True Christian pilgrimages are rooted in silence, the Gospel, pope says

VATICAN CITY (CNS) — To have a true Christian pilgrimage experience along the Camino de Santiago — the popular pilgrimage in northern Spain that leads to the tomb of St. James — pilgrims must cultivate silence, prayer and charity along their route, Pope Francis said.

“It is interesting to see the rise in the number of pilgrims going to Santiago in the last 30 years,” the pope said, recalling also that St. John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI had traveled to the city to pay homage to its “prominence in the Christian history of Europe.”

Meeting Dec. 19 with Italians who had made the pilgrimage, Pope Francis said that the Camino’s increased popularity “poses a serious question: Are people who walk the Camino de Santiago making a true pilgrimage? Or is it something else?”

From 2003 to 2023, Spain saw a nearly 500 percent increase in the number of pilgrims embarking on the Camino. Archbishop Francisco Prieto Fernández of Santiago de Compostela, the pilgrimage’s destination, was also present at the audience.

Pope Francis said that the true Christian pilgrimage experience requires silence, which allows one “to listen with the heart and to find in that way, while walking and through tiredness, the responses which the heart seeks.”

He also emphasized contact with the Gospel, encouraging pilgrims to carry with them a pocket-sized copy of the New Testament and jokingly telling them, “if someone cannot pay for it I will pay, just ask me.”

“The pilgrimage is done rereading the journey that Jesus made, up to the ultimate gift of himself,” he said. “The journey is all the more true, all the more Christian, the more it leads to going out of oneself and giving oneself freely in service to one’s neighbor, and this is done by the Holy Spirit when we read the Gospel every day.”

Unlike when people read novels or the news, the pope said, “when one reads the Gospel there is one next to us,” the Holy Spirit, who “makes us understand that which the Gospel says.”

The pope also said that pilgrims should follow what he called “protocol Matthew 25,” referring to Chapter 25 of St. Matthew’s Gospel in which Jesus says: “whatever you did for one of these least brothers of mine, you did for me.”

“Along the way, be attentive to others, especially those who are struggling the most, those who have fallen, those in need,” the pope said.

Pope Francis said the experience of ancient pilgrims showed that those who embark on Christian pilgrimages “return as apostles.”