Our Lady of Walsingham

Extract

Early in August this year a party of 24 men set out from Bishop’s Stortford carrying a great wooden cross to Walsingham. The distance to be covered was a little more than a hundred miles; the return journey by another route was another hundred. The country between is not very populous; Catholics are extremely few, living scattered in isolated parishes. This was the first fulfilment of a hope expressed in these pages a year ago in an article describing a similar pilgrimage to Vézelay. On that occasion a British party, widely representative, carried a cross from Dieppe, one of fourteen to be set up at Vézelay in an international congress of peace. The congress itself was disappointing, but on the road there was born in the hearts of the pilgrims a new inspiration; they discovered in the following of the cross such an enrichment of life in Christ, such possibilities of apostolate, that they determined to do all they could to introduce the idea into their own country. The pilgrimage was the thing. They set up a committee to pursue this ideal.

Such an undertaking obviously lends itself to misconception. It might be taken to be, it might become, a stunt. More easily still, it might be mistaken for a romantic, rather futile gesture, the nostalgic revival of an old Christian practice. Why, after all, in these days of modern transport, walk to your shrines? Is it not medieval mummery, escaping the hard actualities of the present?