On Pilgrimage 

This Monday is the feast day of St. Thomas Beckett. Beckett was Archbishop of Canterbury until December 29, 1170, when he was murdered in his cathedral by men sent by Henry II, the King of England. The act of violence was due to Beckett’s refusal to cede to the monarch authority over certain ecclesial affairs. The site of St. Thomas’ martyrdom quickly became one of the most important pilgrimage destinations of the Middle Ages, along with Jerusalem, Rome, and Santiago de Compostela. The experience of pilgrimage to the saint’s tomb is famously described in Geoffrey Chaucer’s medieval classic, The Canterbury Tales. 

Terrence Sweeney, a professor at Villanova University, notes that Chaucer’s work, written in 1392, contains stories that are bawdy, vulgar, violent, and scandalous. But none of it, he argues, is gratuitous. Rather, the diverse characters of those on pilgrimage represent the diversity of members of the Church who are passing through this life on the way to judgment. “We are thrown together in this life with noble knights, vain squires, venial friars, and pious plowmen,” he writes. “This is what it means to live in a human world and in a Christianity that is [a mixed bag] – full of saintly sinners and sinful saints.” It is part of God’s providence that we be on pilgrimage thus. In fact, argues Sweeney, the experience of our fellow pilgrims’ foibles is an integral part of the journey. “Life on pilgrimage takes tolerance and patience with those who travel with us because they are sinners. It also takes remembering that we are sinners too and that others tolerate us.  This tolerance does not mean the acceptance of sin, but it does mean the acceptance of sinners.” Unlike The Divine Comedy, whose author offers a vision of souls after judgment and their experiences of Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory, The Canterbury Tales is a vision of the Church in its pre-judgment state on earth. Here, saints and sinners are not so easily distinguished, since sanctity and sinfulness remain mixed within us. According to Sweeney, Chaucer’s work is a helpful corrective for our contemporary age, when “too many – within the Church and without – do not think they are sick, and so do not seek [the remedy].” Quoting the Tales, he writes: “Thinking we are not sinners we do not ‘yearn to go on pilgrimages… to faraway shores/ with their distant shrines known in sundry lands.’” 

The Canterbury Tales reveals the adventure and delight of making a pilgrimage to a holy shrine, thereby revealing to the pilgrim the adventure and delight that life on earth is intended to be. Knowing that a glorious destination awaits, all challenges, discomforts, fatigue, and fights experienced on the way become occasions for us to grow in friendship and holiness, with the help of grace. Pilgrimages are an important part of life as a Catholic, for Catholics believe life itself is a pilgrimage. And though time is running out to make a pilgrimage to Rome to pass through the Holy Doors for the Jubilee Year, which ends on January 6, indulgences are still on offer to those who are willing to confess their sins and endure the penance of making a little pilgrimage downtown to pass through the designated Holy Doors of the Basilica of St. John the Evangelist. 

posted 12/27/25