GERMANY'S RELIGIOUS PILGRIMS

As in Chaucer’s time, religious pilgrims continue to seek distant shrines in sundry lands. An editor at CFO magazine visits several Catholic pilgrimage sites in the German countryside, where the ordinary meets tales of the extraordinary ...

From ECONOMIST.COM

In Kevelaer, a small German town near the Dutch border, the city centre is all but deserted. Only the occasional pensioner cycles along the cobblestones. A light fog gives the streets around the imposing 19th-century basilica an eerie feeling, but the fenced-off pavilions and shops selling religious curios hint that this area isn’t always so empty. Indeed, some 800,000 pilgrims visit Kevelaer between May and November, coming to worship “Our Lady of Kevelaer, Comforter of the Afflicted”.

As in Chaucer’s time, with the spring thaw folk long to go on pilgrimages, seeking distant shrines renowned in sundry lands. More than 114,000 hiked the famous Catholic pilgrim trails to Santiago de Compostela in Spain in 2007, up from 25,000 ten years earlier, according to the latest statistics from the local archdiocese. By most accounts, last year also saw the largest Hajj in history at Mecca, while each successive Kumbh Mela on the banks of the Ganges sets a record for human congregation. For many of these pilgrims, as was the case for those that made their way from Southwark to Canterbury, the journey is sometimes as significant as the destination.

In Kevelaer I meet a friend from Berlin, an academic, who will travel with me through the south and west of Germany, home to several important Catholic pilgrimage sites. Though our trip is neither sacred nor of great moral significance—my companion studies architectural history, so we are visiting several historic and modern buildings for research purposes—some of the religious sites we visit lend a pilgrim’s air even to the secular stops on the itinerary.

Many aspects of modern travel can be seen as a kind of pilgrimage, even if a climate-controlled cruise down the Autobahn has little in common with a solemn trudge through the Pyrenees. Are not the hordes of Elvis enthusiasts that descend on Graceland or the fashion fans that flock to the “shopping Mecca” of Milan also pilgrims of a sort? “A tourist is half a pilgrim, if a pilgrim is half a tourist,” write Victor and Edith Turner, noted anthropologists both.

We start in sleepy Kevelaer because, in 1641, on three separate occasions Hendrick Busman, an itinerant merchant, heard a voice as he passed a cross erected on the road nearby. Each time the voice implored him to build a chapel on the site. Meanwhile, his wife Mechel had a vision of a chapel housing a picture of the Virgin and Child she had seen for sale a few days earlier. Heeding the perceived holy command, the couple procured the picture, a tiny copper plate, and set about convincing their neighbours to build a chapel to house it.

As word of the voices and visions spread, pilgrims came to Kevelaer to see the picture. After reports of miracles—the lame walking, the blind seeing—the chapel cemented its place on the pilgrim map, with companion churches, a nunnery and the aforementioned basilica now radiating from the modest original structure. A window in the hexagonal shrine allows passers by to see the copper picture at any time, “and Mary’s gaze follows them, the pilgrims, as they return to their daily lives,” reads the literature from the local pilgrimage office.

Visiting outside of the high season, it is striking how pilgrimage can transform the fortunes of an otherwise unremarkable place. It is easy to dismiss similar “miracles” today, perhaps because modern communications carry news of more visions, voices and the like than can be explained by divine inspiration alone, especially considering ulterior motives for civic or personal profit. A lively book, “Madonna of the Toast,” chronicles some of the more unlikely sacred sightings in recent times, including the Virgin Mary’s likeness on the grilled-cheese sandwich that inspired the title. Though few pilgrims beat a path to Diane Duyser’s kitchen in Hollywood, Florida, she eventually sold the sandwich on eBay for $28,000—a price that seems, in its own way, rather miraculous.

Picture credit: Hyperfinch (via Flickr)

(This is an instalment of a week-long correspondent's diary about German pilgrimage sites, published on Economist.com.)