January 2026 Print

By Fr. Peregrino

Perhaps half of the pilgrims on the Camino to Santiago de Compostela are Catholic. It is an explicitly Catholic pilgrimage, deeply connected to the Catholic history of Europe. Nevertheless many pilgrims start out with a natural motive in mind: physical endurance, cultural tourism, a cost-effective holiday. But the Camino is inescapably Catholic: its every step is surrounded by the symbols of the faith, and at the heart of it all are the Apostle St. James and his master, Our Lord Jesus Christ.

The pilgrimage itself is just as much internal as external. Yes, there are the miles and the practical side of each day, but even those pilgrims unaccustomed to prayer find themselves first in great introspective silence, then in serious conversation with their fellow pilgrims. “Why do you walk? What do you carry?” Everyone’s answers grew in depth the longer they had been walking. A definite separation from the world, and a clear common purpose with your neighbor made conversation easy.

Jacob insisted to me that he wasn’t really going to Santiago. A non-Catholic from Toulouse, he made jokes that he and his friends had given up waiting for the Messias to come, and even though he was comfortable walking with a Catholic priest, he made clear that he was on his way to a jazz festival in Finisterre, the end of the earth, where the Camino meets the Atlantic. Even though he shared a name with St. James, as he told me as we walked together through Rioja, he was planning on not even setting a foot in the Cathedral. He knew about the Camino and was trying it because while he had waited in line for a show before, he had never prepared for one for thirty days like this. He had nothing else going on, so he had started his way alone, interested only in the music.

At the center of each town was the church. Many of them were locked and abandoned, but others were a welcome rest among the old stones and candles. Statues and stained glass of St. James on pilgrimage, or on horseback in battle. The incomparable sadness of the Sorrowful Virgin, adorned in black. Some churches displayed memorial plaques for those of the parish who were martyred in the last century. One afternoon we were setting up Mass in the garden of the pilgrim’s refuge, when the hostess asked if we would prefer to use the church. When we agreed, she asked if she could ring the bell and invite the villagers to Mass. They had not had Mass in their church for seven years. There were visible tears during the Salve Regina at the end of Mass. A very old man gave me two walnuts and asked for prayers.

Relaxing with a guitar in the mountains above Astorga, my host of that evening told me a story of a Spanish pilgrim. This man had come home from work to be blindsided by a note from his wife, who had left him. Standing with the note in hand, his life in shambles, and the open door behind him, he heard singing behind him on the street. Outside he saw a group of young men with staves in their hands, going on Camino. He asked them to wait a moment, dropped the note, locked his door, and joined them with nothing besides the clothes on his back. “He was thinking, what now? These people have a direction, they will point out the right way.” At this point in the story, the host had inadvertently switched from telling it in third person to first person. “I never went home,” he told me. “I don’t know what happened to my old house. I’ve run this pilgrims’ refuge for twenty-five years now.”

In some places the Camino can be seen from miles away, carving a dusty East-West line across fields of wheat or sunflowers, widened by centuries of pilgrims. Some parts make use of the ancient Roman roads. In other places the path is a concrete sidewalk, marked with the yellow scallop shell on a blue background: all of the lines on the shell converge at a single point, just as all the routes of the Camino meet in Santiago, and all the saints travel their different paths to reach Heaven.

My parents and I were having coffee one Sunday morning after Mass in Galicia when a local couple approached us at our table. “Will you stay here and be our priest? We have no priest for our church.”

Jacob was waiting for me at the top of a ridge. The pace of the Camino brings familiar faces back each day; even if your pilgrimage started out as your own, a community forms naturally and easily. Jacob asked me seriously: “I must pray a decade of the rosary. What is a rosary and how do I do that?” As we continued he explained: he and another French pilgrim had fallen in together as they walked, and the conversation turned to prospects of lunch in the next town. The pilgrim suggested that it was still ten kilometers away, but Jacob insisted it was just five kilometers off. The pilgrim playfully wagered him a decade of the rosary, not knowing that Jacob was not Catholic, and Jacob, sure of himself, took the wager. The Catholic pilgrim had judged the distance correctly and continued on his way. But Jacob explained to me that he had passed a sleepless night: he was a man of his word, he had made a bet and owed this man a decade of the rosary, but he did not know how to discharge his debt yet. He learned, and he kept his word.

One church just off the path in rural Galicia was tolling its bell for a requiem, inviting us to pray. Inside with the casket was an old woman pulling the bell rope and no one else. “We have a priest, but he has twenty-eight other parishes,” she told me, still ringing the bell. “There is no priest for the funeral. We will have Mass next month.”

The first American I met was a Wisconsin man in his late-seventies who had been walking for three months at that point, just two days away from Santiago. He was not Catholic, but his wife of fifty years had just passed away. He told me that he could not bear to stay at home alone yet, and he had heard that the Camino would give peace of soul to those looking for it. He had started his way in Germany.

Two miracles adorn the last few days of the Camino and remind the pilgrims of the necessity of the sacraments. First, a Eucharistic miracle in O Cebreiro: where the carved statue of Our Lady, originally upright, now with head bowed, continues to show respect to Our Lord where others did not. Then the miracle of the confessional in Furelos, when the priest intended to withhold forgiveness, the crucifix gave absolution, saying, “I gave My life for my son, if you do not absolve him, I absolve him.” The crucifix still has its right hand extended. Things prepared by men, defective men, reshaped by God.

In Dante’s Paradiso, the poet has St. James examine the pilgrim on the virtue of hope: what it is and where it comes from. A pilgrimage is at root an act of hope, the expectation of the glory of God proceeding from His grace. Leaving our sins behind one step at a time and consecrated entirely to the service of God; a consecration that does not end when the walking does. One who starts a pilgrimage remains a pilgrim all the days of his life. Among all of the other wonders in the Cathedral of Santiago, my fellow pilgrim Jacob was there too. Something along his way had changed his mind, and he completed his pilgrimage.