Pilgrimage is a journey of hope

Pilgrims respond to a need for the extraordinary

Last Saturday, Bishop Philip Boyce OCD spoke at the Knock Novena on the theme of pilgrimage as a ‘Journey of Hope’, on the annual pilgrimage to Knock by the Diocese of Raphoe. Using Knock as an example he said “shrines or approved places of apparitions are like stations or stopping places on the pilgrimage of life. What makes them holy is above all the prayer and penance, the reconciliation and conversion of a countless number of pilgrims”.

Bishop Boyce said a shrine like Knock, which is celebrating 135 years since the Marian Apparition, is not simply a holy spot, but above all a place where “Christ is encountered, where God is met and where Our Lady shows us the power of her intercession”. “This becomes either a life-changing experience or at least a meeting that gives renewed strength and energy for the onward journey. The Shrine may well have originated in an Apparition of Our Lady, but it is her dearest wish to lead us to her beloved Son. In Knock she, and the saints and angels who also appeared, direct our gaze to the Lamb on the altar who takes away the sins of the world.

“To each pilgrim she seems to say, as she did to the servants at the marriage feast in Cana: ‘Do whatever he tells you’ (Jn 2: 5).”

The Bishop of Raphoe said a pilgrimage is a journey in hope. “A pilgrimage leads to the joy of forgiveness and conversion, and to the partial fulfilment of our hopes. But in turn, the reaching of our destination here below, whether it be Knock or Compostella, Lourdes or Fatima, Guadalupe or Lough Derg, is only a foretaste and a sign of that better world, the homeland where all our longings will be satisfied at the end of life’s pilgrim journey.”

Shrines

Bishop Boyce said pilgrimages respond to a need in the human heart, and we go on pilgrimage “hoping to gain something beyond what is ordinary and commonplace”. He said while the number of people going to church may have decreased in the last 50 years, “at least in the Western world”, the number of people who go on pilgrimage to shrines “in these same secularised countries” has steadily increased.

The bishop said the manner of travel may have changed, but the basic attitude of journeying to a holy place “where the pilgrim hopes to have a deeper encounter with the living God and gain new hope and energy for the onward journey”, remains the same.

“Wealth and technological advances do not still the hunger of the soul and its thirst for truth and love.

“The human heart was made for something greater, more lasting and beyond the material. It will be ever restless and searching, ever ‘on pilgrimage’ we could say, until it finds the God who makes sense of all things and who answers all the cravings of the human spirit,” Bishop Boyce said.