The Pilgrim’s Journey

The Franciscan Jubilee marking 800 years since the saint’s death makes 2026 an uncommon year to bring a parish to Assisi. A pastor’s guide to forming pilgrims, celebrating the sacraments, and bringing the grace home.

Under one roof in Jerusalem stand Calvary and the empty tomb, a few dozen steps apart. What the Catholic pilgrim sees there that the tourist walks past.

Ask a priest what changed after his parish went on pilgrimage and he rarely starts with the sites. He starts with the parish, and the families who now pray together.

There is a sound you notice in Medjugorje before you understand it: the long, unhurried quiet of people waiting to confess. Outside St. James Church, the confessionals line up in row after row, marked by little signs in a dozen languages, and the lines in

There is a reason Medjugorje has drawn more than forty million pilgrims in four decades, and it has little to do with sightseeing. People come down off the hillsides changed. They return to confession after twenty years away. Marriages are mended, vocations discovered, lukewarm faith

Mary walked this ground before it was anyone’s pilgrimage route—a girl in Nazareth, a young mother on the road to Bethlehem, a grieving woman at the foot of the Cross in Jerusalem. To follow the Marian sites in the Holy Land is to trace the