“I just saw Martin Sheen!” exclaimed a blogger on a site devoted to the pilgrim road to Santiago de Compostela. Indeed, the fictional President of the United States has been spotted, like some greying yeti, at locations all along the 500-mile route from Roncesvalles in the Pyrenees to the very threshold of the Galician pilgrim destination.
Sheen and his son Emilio Estevez have been making a film to be called The Way, about an American who carries his son’s ashes on the Camino to the Spanish pilgrimage city. “Great, all we need now is Madonna or Bono,” reacted another pilgrim-blogger, “no doubt with a lackey carrying the bags, and that will be it, the world’s largest theme park.”
There’s something in that worry, for 250,000 pilgrims are expected this year. As July 25, the feast of St James, falls on a Sunday, 2010 is counted as a Holy Year, swelling the numbers. Pilgrims may not believe that the Apostle James arrived in Spain in a boat of stone, but plenty still want to visit his reputed remains in the stunning Romanesque and baroque cathedral in north-west Spain.
Does North America have any pilgrimage routes?
Check out this video of the thurible at Santiago Cathedral in Spain.
If it hits you, you’ll know it !
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iXWMi9oarQ8
Well, #1, you could start by looking up the shrine for Blessed Kateri Tekakwitha in upstate NY at Fonda: http://www.katerishrine.com/
There is a pilgrimage, for secular Franciscans in this instance, listed in the July-August schedule.
it’s interesting to see this post come up since for the past week, without knowing why, I have been moved to read about Galicia. It must be something in the air as July 25, St. James’ Day, approaches. Anyway, what I learned about Galicia (the province Franco came from) is how very poor it is and has been for about a millenium. Its local language is more similar to Portuguese than Spanish, and both Galician and Spanish are in use. It is a region similar to Catalonia, where in Barcelona last week a million people demonstrated for autonomy, I gather something like the French in Quebec. We all know how well that has worked out for Canada, Montreal and residents of that province. Could it be that attempts to keep the pilgrimage route of Compostela alive are important to the socio-economic future of an area that is really still quite poor especially in its hinterlands? In any case the devotion of Santiago de Compostela is important in catholic Christianity for having given the inspiration to the founders of the Cursillo movement just after WWII, as well as its much longer historic significance in the life of the Church. This corner of Spain was hardly reached by the Moors in their 6-700 years of Iberian dominance.