All Roads Lead to Indianapolis
All roads lead to Indianapolis — for the thousands of Christian pilgrims walking the roads of America with Jesus, that is.
For two months, men and women from all walks of life have been participating in a historic Eucharistic pilgrimage, bringing the presence of Jesus on a 6,500-mile journey that has never taken place in the more than 2,000-year history of the Catholic Church. Beginning two months ago, pilgrims starting in four different locations began walking along four different routes, some days as few as two miles others as many as 20, bringing Jesus in the Eucharist from church to church, past Costco’s and Dollar Generals, along highways and byways, over oceans and rivers, and across the fruited plains of America. They will meet this week in Indianapolis along with tens of thousands of others for the first National Eucharistic Congress in almost a century.
Their mission? To revive a sense of awe and wonder and love for Jesus alongside fellow pilgrims in this life on Earth.
It’s surely a needed mission in a nation where religion and belief in God is in serious decline. A recent study from Pew found that religious “nones,” or those who describe their religion as “nothing in particular,” are now the largest group in America. Talking heads are quick to point to the fact that young people are leading the drop in religious belief, with one-third of millennials and Gen Z identifying as nonreligious.
And yet it is young people who have overwhelmingly been leading the Eucharistic pilgrimage. Natalie Garza, a 25-year-old high school religion teacher in Kansas, has been the team leader for the Seton route the entire 65-day journey. Rather than fatigued, she is on fire. “No one has walked this long and this far with Jesus,” she told me animatedly of the historic nature of the journey, “let alone throughout a whole nation the size of a continent.”
Seminarian Noah U’ren, traveling the Diego route, likened the experience to an actual fire in an interview in coordination with EWTN. “It’s like starting a prairie fire,” he said.
“Because with a prairie fire, you have a man who's walking a line with a tank of fuel and a drip hose, and he's just leaking the fuel along. And all the while, there's this giant flame arising right behind him. And he can't stop and look back or else I'll catch up to him. He has to keep going. And I think that's part of the beauty of the Pilgrimage is that you know it's there. You see the fire, you feel the heat. But this is meant to erupt into a ginormous Prairie fire at the end of the day.”
Others experienced the pilgrimage as a journey of humbling and healing love between fellow travelers and those who received them.
Camille Anigbogu, of Houston, described “a moment in Louisiana where we went to a little parish called St. Henry's. It's a mostly Hispanic parish. We stopped, we went to the church, and the people there washed our feet for us. It was such a beautiful moment of grace because we got to be like the Apostles in the moment where Jesus washes their feet. And I felt so loved by that action.”
She describes another moment in the diocese of Biloxi when they were walking across an overpass over the Gulf and a woman got out of her car on the other side of the road and ran to kneel as the procession passed by. “That was a little moment that showered the faith that people have.”
Archbishop Salvatore J. Cordileone described a similar sense of peaceful devotion in his experience bringing the Eucharist over the Gold Gate Bridge in the Serra route. “Carrying our Lord in the Blessed Sacrament over the Golden Gate Bridge with my fellow Catholics was a joy beyond description. Onlookers used to seeing protests on the iconic bridge saw Catholics filled with peace, prayer and devotion. It was a blessing to us and to the city that we love named after the great St. Francis,” he told me.
Mother Mary Maximilian of the Daughters of Mary, Mother of Healing Love in New Hampshire described her “Pilgrimage caravan” as “a GMC diesel truck driven by a retired naval lieutenant named Beth pulling an airstream trailer with four nuns and Beth’s dog.” “We're like a reality tv show," she joked, "we go from the sublime to the hilarious everyday."
Jokes aside, she felt the pilgrimage contributed to profound healing nationwide. She was particularly moved by their visit to a prison in Columbus, Ohio, where their group held a holy hour and processed with the Eucharistic around the inside of the prison walls. They had the opportunity to interact with the prisoners, who she said were, “awed that we would find value in them.” These prisoners were there, she said, “because there was a fracture of love in their lives,” something only the “authentic love of Jesus can heal.”
These, she reminded me, “are the people that Jesus chose for his friends.”
Others describe the experience as, like Jesus himself, outside of time. Charlie McCullough, walking the Diego route, said, “every time measurement right now feels fake. Every moment feels like a year and two seconds at the same time.”
For Father Roger Landry, the chaplain at Columbia University, the experience was more of a culmination of time, as he marked 25 years as a priest by walking the entire 1,200 miles of the Seton Route.
“It’s a great grace that my 25th anniversary of priestly ordination has coincided with what is essentially a 65-day walking retreat,” he told me. “I’ve been renewed and deepened in my Eucharistic love and identity. My 54-year old body has held up rather well under the physical demands and my soul has rejoiced to have so much time to hold Jesus two inches from my face, to adore him, to bring him to others, to receive him at Mass and give him to multitudes.”
This historic march of the multitudes comes to a close this week. But the faith journey of these Americans and those they have touched, healed, and inspired along the way, will continue from this life to the next.
