Religious Tourism in Europe

 

I – Walking new paths

Since participating in the ‘Crossroads of Europe’ event almost a year ago in Pavia, Italy, I have felt a lingering hunger within me. The religious routes all came together, certainly, but they were only really invited to talk about figures and technical things. So as I get ready for the second Crossroads edition, this time in Toulouse, I wanted to take a look at how religious tourism is presented, often above the religions themselves, on the European stage.

Print

I am always delighted to find in my letterbox a paper envelope containing a journal printed in ink, with colour photographs to make my mind wander. A journal I can pick out, leaf through, leave on the table, pick up again when I please, then stow away in my library where it will remain for however many years conversing with the novels that, by sharing that space, it will discover and, I hope, will penetrate and pollute it. This is the unfathomable mystery of libraries, where secret dramas are played out that cause the texts to change by the time we pick them up again years after we deposited them there. This sounds a little contradictory of me, I know! I am of course perfectly accustomed to the intangible: I fill digital space unapologetically, often quite repetitively, and the publications I subscribe to have also submitted to it; they have become downloadable. So I take them with me in virtual folders where they no longer see another soul, where they do not even know if they exist in reality or what relation they have with the people who wrote their words. All the same, I hope that they meet some spy software which is trying to ascertain whether they are plotting to destabilise the world or not. If everyone really knew the true power of the written word, and remembered the revolutionary role played by the first works to come off the presses, there would be many more spy programmes around!

This is all to say a sincere thank you to Gaëlle de la Brosse for two reasons: for thinking of me retired away in Strasbourg and for making me want to look through an issue – a special edition, as they are called – which walks us down new, contemporary pilgrimages  

I am also grateful to Luca Bruschi for suggesting I write an article on spirituality, purification of the route and the water, thus harking back to our roots when the springs themselves were a pilgrimage site and a place of purification. So, I am preparing to show this connection between a number of European routes. This article will come out in the next issue of the Revue Via Francigena, which will be presented on 8 June in Colle di Val d’Elsa. These two events coinciding, I was forced to retrace my steps and fill this hole left in me by the Pavia presentations.

Arriving at Santiago de Compostela Cathedral

Twenty-five years

Twenty-five years after! Twenty-five years of frenzied searching for toil and for dialogue, a relentless daily celebration of sharing and exchange undertaken by millions, no, tens of millions of pilgrims and walkers. And then, it must be said, genuine disappointment over a basically diplomatic celebration of European cultural routes in front of the Santiago deCompostela Cathedral last October. A rather eerie celebration, far removed from the pilgrims themselves and the associations which help them take on this difficult undertaking and help give them a boost along the way. Is this better than nothing?

It did, however, provide plenty of nostalgia for the inaugural and 20^th anniversary celebrations when the square outside Santiago de Compostela Cathedral was packed with people and listened to young people in a mixture of English, French, Galician and Castilian; longing for the exposition, which sadly could not be moved elsewhere, that symbolised all of our shared values and all the routes created over all these years; and finally longing for the roads marked with the names of all the European routes, in all European languages: ephemeral yet unforgettable moments.

October 2007. Young people preparing for the reading of the Declaration

It is a difficult feeling to describe, created by all of these occasions, which grew so much stronger each day that October as we went back to our roots under the banners of the Olive Tree, the Euro-Mediterranean Phoenicians, or even the Cluniac monks.

Times have changed and so too have the objectives: more economic now, certainly, and geared toward the need to convince decision-makers that order and methodology have taken priority over the spontaneity of a democratic success which places all the importance on the users! Have we now become merely pilgrimage tour operators, to the extent that we no longer celebrate except to welcome top-level officials rather than for the images, memories and the imagination of a Europe on the move?

October 2007, Europe is the Way exposition

Pilgrimages have been part of the very definition of Hospitality since the beginning. “It has long been considered a gesture of charity which consists of receiving and offering free food and shelter to those in need and travellers, in particular pilgrims. Hospitality was thus considered a demonstration of virtue.” It’s intrinsic, then! Here it is in its purest expression, as a Christian value and as a moment of development for the Route, making faith stronger and more solid, as though hospitality represented an argument for the Route itself and the Route was established along the path of points of sharing, where moral, physical and mental health is given or restored in exchange for foreign culture, yet the deepest foundations of which lie in the sharing of transcendent experiences.

The fact that, in claiming a secular aspect to it, this route of faith and spirituality has now become a route of European dialogue, a sort of open-air laboratory for (re)constructing Europe, is not just a tangible sign of modernity, it is confirmation that taking to the route is tantamount to abandoning prejudices and being ready to be ‘measured’ on the strength of one’s hospitality.

New routes?

When reading this Pèlerin special edition, you do see, page after page, that times have changed in the variety of options on offer. And you are quickly reassured that our values are not fading away when you read the testimonies of the walkers. Perhaps these walkers may become guardians of European language and spirit, or discover the end of selfishness and the beginning of dialogue, simply by putting one foot in front of the other. Having followed them for 25 years, I am fully convinced that they have changed, but only for the better, keeping alive the spirit of travel and retracing bit-by-bit the pilgrimage and its changes through history as paths cross, follow on from one another and muddle with each other.

The portfolio which opens the issue is superb. It makes you want to grab your bag and head off to discover Europe immediately; celebrate it by toiling up its ascents and finding relief at its summits; breathe Europe in deep when at times the odour of its politics stifles you. What better week could there be to so than the week in which we remember the dates of the treaties which wrote Europe, from London to Rome.

Saint Martin on the Loire, on the way back to Tours

We are not wanting for choice, not by any means: Saint Michael in the succession of hilltop sanctuaries where the New Jerusalem becomes more than just a symbol; Saint Martin of Tours, connecting the key places in the life of the converted soldier, evangelist and showing the first example of a monasticism open to the world; the Tro Breizh so dear to Gaëlle which invites you to venerate the Seven Founding Saints of Brittany; Saint Gilles du Gard, which adjoins a footpath toward Santiago de Compostela, the end of the Regordane Way and peers out across the sea towards the Holy Land; and finally Assise from Vèzelay to the epitome of the symbol of a Route of Peace, a Via della Pace. The Via Francigena also passes here, a symbolic delineation of all the roads which lead to Rome on which you come to recognise walkers on the way back down from Norway, breaking off from the paths which connect another Finisterre in Nidaros – the Trondheim Fjord.

On the Via Francigena

A global phenomenon, thanks to the diverse origins of those who walk it. A European phenomenon thanks to the network in which the many smaller tributaries have set about feeding the well-established and well-signposted flows towards Santiago de Compostela, Rome, Nidaros or Mont Saint Michel. Thousands of walkers converge, mingle, surprise each other and at times get on each other’s nerves, each separately thinking back to their homes, but all looking toward the same goal.

In this way, on goes the spirit of those who set out again after the Second World War to feel the physical release which comes with crossing a border, although their borders are now more personal than political. The European prison camps and gulags have almost all been opened. There remain social barriers, but the routes have also helped to remove them, as the time spent walking, sharing in the fatigue, opens the way to better understanding. A sharing of the load in times of to a certain extent, as well. Sharing your fear, even though its face has changed.

“La vertu de l’ascension” (virtue of the ascent) as Jean-Christophe Rufin writes (Immortelle randonné : Compostelle malgré moi, Editions Guérin, April 2013) in a fit of mysticism, which I prefer to call spirituality. By describing how he progressed down his long pilgrimage path without a break, except the odd break to his body, he also conjures up the Buddhist pilgrimage, steadily disciplining his body and feeling a breath of wind from a desired beyond, from a world a French president called the world of dark forces. Step by step, every walker does steadily find his faith now as they did after the great drama of the century. In his or her own way, each one holds a shaky conviction created from the bits of pieces of their lives and hopes. The immortal walk reconnects us with our roots. When could we take the time to search inside ourselves thus if not in the solitude found of a mass on a long walk? What other routes lead us back to our roots in this way and instil in us a blind trust that there is a history there, a story not yet finished?

Hospitality

I would like to reiterate (see ‘Hospitality – the Foundation of a European Culture: the Bridges of Europe’, Arles’ meeting, 1st European Congress of the Union Jacquaire de France, 1 March 2008) that this is in some ways a giant leap into the unknown: a common European vision, yet one in which we must respectfully acknowledge local differences impervious to open identities. Therefore, I can only welcome the fact that over 25 years other pilgrimage routes have been added, routes to other sanctuaries, some older, some more modern, others parallel, complementary or alternative routes, or on which we again look to explore the paths of monasticism, in the East as in the West. This diversity enhances the European approach, compiling a map, complex undoubtedly, but alive and moving, of a Europe on the move, culminating in the victory of Hospitality over Hostility, and rediscovering use of the land, like an understanding of the landscape for he or she who becomes its host.

The Olive Tree Route in Santiago de Compostela

Coming back to the anthropology of Hospitality, it is important to follow some good guides. For example, the term is reviewed by the 90 authors Alain Montandon brings together for the work Le Livre de l’hospitalité: Accueil de l’étranger, published by Editions Bayard in 2004. The thoughts of Michel Serres, Paul Ricoeur, Michel Foucault and Marcel Mauss are mixed with those of two authors united by hope: Emmanuel Lévinas and Jacques Derrida, who are at the very heart of the anthropology of a value which relates to ancient religious laws and codes of ethics.

The universality or even the unlimited nature of Hospitality according to Lévinas represents the very opposite of racism and highlights the infinite massacres which have tried to do away with or wipe out many types of Others deemed unacceptable or ‘unwelcomable’, to test out a neologism, for example: the Jew, the Gypsy, the Homosexual, the Communist in a fascist regime and the reverse, the Dissident in the communist regime. “‘Guest, we don’t know what to call you: is there any indiscretion in asking you your name?’ ‘Well,’ said I, ‘I have some doubts about it myself; so suppose you call me Guest,” writes William Morris in News from Nowhere, 1891.

“Having reached the end of the journey, I said to myself, ‘I haven’t arrived’: I understood that the goal was not a material one” says Jean-Christophe Rufin. Many say the same. Beyond all doubt, this is the deepest meaning of this new tourism we call ‘cultural and religious’.