Can a person commit pilgrimage “adultery”? In all the planning leading up to taking a group of Catholic Herald pilgrims along a portion of the Via di Francesco – the Way of St Francis – to Assisi in Italy, I felt a strange sense of unease about being engaged in a form of betrayal.
For my peregrino pilgrim credentials were well and truly forged in Spain on the famous Camino de Santiago. My first Camino, in 2017, was a life-changing experience, and the Camino came to my rescue in 2021 during the pandemic by offering me a way out of the madness as I once again picked up my walking poles. I owe a great deal to St James – my namesake – and to the Camino and Spain.
I am so conditioned by my encounters with the Camino that I can spot a scallop shell – the symbol of St James and the Camino – from 100 yards; and the sight of a yellow arrow spray-painted on a wall releases a shot of dopamine every time. Some people chant the Om mantra to connect to the Absolute Principle of Existence – I merely close my eyes and say “Camino” to myself, or touch a backpack still covered in trail dust.
There are no yellow arrows or scallop shells on the Via di Francesco. It is marked by small yellow-and-blue-striped patches – like mini Ukraine flags – and by the tau, the elegant T- like symbol of St Francis . As our Via di Francesco group proceeded north from our starting point at Terni – about 70km north of Rome, and a 108km walk from Assisi – it was impossible not to compare and contrast the Way of Saint Francis and the Way of Saint James pilgrimages as we followed the different way markers.
That said, there is no genuine substance to the idea of a pilgrimage “standoff ” between the two routes. Both pilgrimages are remarkable experiences taken in their entireties, though I think the Assisi trek pushed the editor of the Catholic Herald out of his comfort zone rather more than the Spanish one. But in interrogating the differences between the two, the pilgrim is brought to a better and deeper understanding about his or her role in life, and about what both pilgrimages aim to reveal: the Tao, also known as the Way, through the thickets of our contemporary world.
The Camino de Santiago is far more popular than the Via di Francesco: the former attracts around 300,000 pilgrims a year, while the latter is around the tens of thousands. But as one of our Assisi pilgrims noted, the Camino de Santiago is based on the legend that the apostle’s remains came to Spain, with most scholars disputing that he ever went there. Whereas the Via di Francesco is unequivocally rooted in concrete connections to St Francis and the region of Umbria that he called home and through which the route traverses.
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It is also worth considering how, of the two saints, St Francis arguably speaks to our age more acutely. He was born at a time in the 13th century when “money was becoming more than simply a social convention, a medium of economic exchange,” Donald Spoto writes in Reluctant Saint: The Life of Francis of Assisi. “People were beginning to pursue money as a primary goal, and the amount of money one acquired determined one’s status in the community.”
Conspicuous consumption had arrived, Spoto notes, alongside the pursuit of wealth as an end in itself, a process Francis dramatically turned his back on. But those trends that Francis shunned have only accelerated and ensnared so much of the Western world and its mindset.
“Society in the 21st century, in fact, operates on the same tacit assumption that began in the 13th – namely, that money can indeed buy happiness, or at least rent it,” Spoto says.
While St Francis would appear to have the edge in terms of relevance to the challenges posed by today’s consumerist and careerist societies, from a pilgrim’s perspective, St James and the Camino de Santiago is hard to beat when it comes to that moment of crescendo at the end of the pilgrimage. It casts the entry into Assisi as a somewhat diminished experience.
“There are no crowds of cheering pilgrims falling on their knees in celebration of arrival,” says Russ Eanes in Pilgrim Paths to Assisi. “Assisi is crowded with tourists and pilgrims who may have arrived via bus or car or train, but it is not crowded, like Santiago, with streams of pilgrims carrying backpacks.”
The good news is that later on in the day in Assisi, once the coaches of visitors have left, or early in the morning before they arrive, if you wander the narrow empty streets that wind along and up through its different levels, you encounter a more contemplative and holy place. And like Santiago de Compostela, there is something about the stone walls of Assisi that is reassuring, even meaningful.
“Stones are old, but they were themselves created by geologic action over millions of years,” writes Eanes, noting how stones “were once alive” having been created by “pressure and heat of the earth, the living power of its core”. It leaves him pondering how the “energy of the earth [and] rocks” might be transferred, and how this might have been one of the reasons Francis sought out caves and spaces hidden in the landscape to better connect with “Sister Mother Earth”.
While walking towards Assisi, I can’t deny I missed my yellow arrows, though the Assisi way markers had the same desired effect and, most of the time, kept me and the other Herald pilgrims on the straight and narrow. Regardless of stylistic differences, we all need way markers, whether yellow arrows or taus. But amid all the confusion and distractions that blight our societies of secular liberalism, where are those societal yellow arrows when you need them? Many are being scrubbed out, while politicians don’t appear willing to speak out about this, resulting in people becoming unmoored as our democracies creak under the strain.
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“The West lives under a single political regime, managerial liberalism, that integrates the interests of commercial and bureaucratic elites,” says James Kalb in The Decomposition of Man: Identity, Technocracy, and the Church. “Liberal modernity claims to be based on freedom and equality, but it attempts to tur n social life into an industrial process under detailed expert supervision and control.”
This, he argues, leads to disruptive consequences for “local, non-market and nonbureaucratic institutions” and for the “traditional identities and patterns of life” that go with them. In turn, this suppresses “the things people actually live by, their ability to live in accordance with nature and reason, and their understanding of who they are”.
St Francis is famous for his embrace of the natural world. But he also shines as a blistering repudiation to the inauthenticity of today’s emerging social order based on vapid pronouncements about inclusiveness, equity and open-ended self-definition to achieve your “best life” and fulfilment.
“His life and example… had an integrity that challenges our presumptions about what constitutes a good life,” Spoto says. “His life bears witness to the fact that holiness is not by necessity a denial of one’s humanity, or something added on to it. Holiness may in fact be the deepest achievement of what is authentically human. Here we are very close to the Christian mystery of the Incarnation.”
At the same time, Francis’ radical poverty and humility stands at odds with the pursuit of power and wealth by our elites, who “believe they are the most enlightened and well-informed people who ever lived,” Kalb says. Both Ss Francis and James were rebels who went against the status quo of their times – in James’s case by challenging the tenets of Judaism. Similarly, going on a pilgrimage today to the shrines of these holy counter-cultural icons increasingly feels like an act of rebellion against secular society.
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Ideas and views that during normal daily life you might rarely get to share – either through lack of opportunity or unwritten censure – can be explored on pilgrimage with your fellow travellers. Every step you take on pilgrimage becomes a physical declaration in defence of your beliefs, what you stand for and the sort of person you hope to be.
“In the end, from those paths bathed in the tranquillity of a tired sun, the civilised world, society with its fears, its tinpot grandiloquence, its electric thrills, its furies, [they all seem] nothing more than one long-drawn-out disaster,” Frédéric Gros writes in A Philosophy of Walking. “You feel free, because whenever you remember the former signs of your commitments in hell – name, age, profession, CV – it all seems absolutely derisory, miniscule, insubstantial.”
Pilgrimage also serves as a physical act of rebellion against the sedentary desk- and laptop-bound lives in which we only communicate with people through screens and message boxes.
“We need real experiences more than ever,” says Eanes. “During the pandemic I heard repeatedly that ‘virtual’ – online – experiences were our future. Forget the office, forget the school, go online. I don’t agree. We need actual experiences with others – physical experiences. We need physical activity and social engagement with each other. Western society is addicted to screens, with the resultant negative consequences.”
Both the Way of St James and the Way of St Francis enable you to escape what Kalb calls the “spiritual slavishness” that characterises so many of the bureaucratised organisations that either r un our societies or which people have to work for. Following these holy trails also allows you to have a break from the relentless “distraction and dissipation” of modern pop culture, enabling you to re-engage with, as Kalb puts it, “the heights and depths of human experience – love, loyalty, family, friendship, enmity, loss, defeat, aging and death.”
He describes the “deeply unsatisfying” bland landscape of modern living. The result, he says, is a desperate need for something to “make life larger, more open-ended, and above all less boring.” Walking to Santiago de Compostela or to Assisi, you get a sense of what that something might be or where it might come from. “[Francis] remains before us, across the centuries, as an example of what God can do, which is primarily to astonish, to alter radically the way we live and move,” Spoto says.
On the Ways to Santiago de Compostela and Assisi, we are drawn away from the mirage of daily life and its “important” tasks. If we are lucky, and open our hearts to it, we may even manage a glimpse of that mystical dimension experienced by saints such as St James and St Francis – a dimension that reveals, as Spoto says, “the intersection of the timeless with time, of this world with another”.
Main photo: the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela (credit: Francisco crusat; iStock by Getty Images); other photos, unless specified otherwise, by author.
This is an edited and shortened version of an original article published by Catholic World Report and reproduced with permission, which appears in the April 2024 issue of the Catholic Herald. To subscribe to our multiple-award-winning magazine and have it delivered to your door anywhere in the world, and receive our limited-time Easter offer, go here.
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