Booking is now open for the LMS Walking Pilgrimage to Walsingham, which takes place from Thursday 22nd August to Sunday 25th August. But before we can welcome 200+ pilgrims, we need to be able to look after them. We need volunteers! Today I am going to talk about drivers.
To volunteer, email walsinghampilgrimage@lms.org.uk
From its first year the Pilgrimage has had 'support drivers', and these have been becoming more and more numerous in recent years. For this year, we are in particular need of a van driver, as we need to have two luggage vans, and not just one. We can't get a lorry down the country lanes, so we hire an 'extra long' Mercedes Sprinter, or the the equivalent.
Booking is now open for the LMS Walking Pilgrimage to Walsingham, which takes place from Thursday 21st August to Sunday 24th August. But before we can welcome 220+ pilgrims, we need to be able to look after them. We need volunteers who give up their chance to walk in order to do some quite unglamourous jobs, such as cooking and cleaning.
Each day of the walk there is breakfast and an evening meal. We don't just give pilgrims a paper cup of coffee or an empty milk carton of instant soup (happy though these memories of Chartres are!). While the size of the pilgrimage makes it possible, our cooking team continues to provide real food: bread and jam, porridge and hard boiled eggs for breakfast, and a hot meal made from basic ingredients in the evening.
There is plenty of penance to be had in getting up early to walk 20 miles or so, but our pilgrims don't set off with an empty stomach, and the evenings are convivial. It is another element of Catholic culture which we are aiming to restore, and a reflection of our respect for the walking pilgrims.
Quisquis enim potum dederit vobis calicem aquæ in nomine meo, quia Christi estis : amen dico vobis, non perdet mercedem suam. Mark 9:41
Servers and Sacred Ministers at Mass for the Latin Mass Society's AGM at Westminster Cathedral in 2021. Phot: John Aron.
My latest on One Peter Five is a double book review I wrote for the last Gregorius Magnus. It begins:
This is a reflection on two books published this year:
Catherine Pakaluk Hannah’s Children: The Women Quietly Defying the Birth Dearth (Regnery, 2024)
Paul Morland No One Left: Why the World Needs More Children (Forum, 2024)
Over the last decade or two, we have become used to the fact that we are facing a demographic winter. For some time this fact had to struggle to be heard, because of the entrenched idea that the problem was the opposite, a population explosion that would overwhelm the world’s capacity to produce food. Although this theory was dominant in the 1970s and 1980s, and lingers to this day in some circles, it was always very dubious and for a long time now has been clearly false. The rate of the growth of the world population peaked in the early 1960s. The growth rate has continued to decline since then, and as night follows day it will fall below zero in the decades to come, and the world population will begin to shrink.
These two books give important insights into the relationship between economics, demography, and values. Paul Morland is a demographer without a particular religious axe to grind: he frequently reminds his readers of his support for contraception. Catherine Pakaluk, married to the Catholic philosopher Michael Pakaluk, is a Catholic mother of eight, and also a social scientist with a background in economics, who led a research project to interview 55 women in America who had college degrees and at least five children.
Paul Morland sets out the facts of the demographic implosion the world is facing: how severe it is, how difficult to reverse it will be, and the frightening consequences that can be expected from it. These consequences are already unfolding in Japan, a rich country where old people are increasingly dying alone and untended in their homes. Japan is unusual in having resisted mass immigration as a solution to falling numbers of young people joining the workforce, but as Morland points out, the world as a whole cannot solve its demographic problem through immigration. When poorer countries arrive at the demographic stage that Japan is in today, the consequences for the care of the elderly will be ugly. Already, relatively poor nations such as Thailand and Jamaica have fertility rates well below replacement levels, and many other countries are heading in the same direction. The demographic winter will reach some countries before others, but it is not a problem only for the rich world.
Would you like to walk with 200 others 56 miles from Ely to Our Lady's Shrine in Walsingham, across Norfolk? We've got the pilgrimage for you!
Is that not enough? You can add another 18 miles at the beginning by walking with a smaller group from Cambridge -- or start the previous Sunday and walk from south London!
This is the largest walking Catholic pilgrimage in Britain, and it is powered by Gregorian Chant, good food, and the Traditional Mass. And if you book before Easter you'll get a discount!
Or come as a volunteer, and you could come for free!
We need volunteers to cook, clean, drive vehicles, marshal the pilgrims on the road, take photographs, and sing. More details in posts to follow.
Walsingham is England's ancient Marian shrine: it dates to before the Norman Conquest. Follow the footsteps of your Catholic predecessors, and offer something worthy for the conversion of England, and your private intentions. Booking pages here!
I make an appearance in this video produced by the Catholic Herald.
It's a good short discussion of some issues around the Traditional Mass. My contribution is to object to 'Shine Jesus Shine'; I should say that, in footage not included here, I'm equally critical, and for the same reason, of some old hymns like 'God of Mercy and Compassion'. The problem, in this case, is not the liturgical reform, although (contrary to the wishes of many reformers) it encouraged the invasion of Mass by terrible hymns.
My point is about sentimental, mawkish, emptionally manipulative art and rhetoric, which seems to me to be very much what the traditional liturgy is not. The texts and chants of the liturgy have a very different character: they are astringent, honest, and wholesome; they have an emotional range, certainly, but they put the supernatural message front and centre, and decorate or interpret this. What I object to is when an emotional reaction is sought out first, with the substantive message left as an afterthought. The people doing this would say to us: what's your problem? Look, we've filled the church for you!
The problem is that if you are subjected to lots of emotionally manipulative music, images, and sermons, you will get the impression that there is no justification for this emotion: that it is emotion without substance.
Imagine a saccharine image of the child Jesus: it is all about how sweet he looks, not about the supernatural realities. But other babies are sweet too, and images of other babies can be just as sweet. So if you anchor your devotion to the child Jesus in his looking sweet -- if that is where your religious emotion is coming from -- you can wake up one morning and think 'that's just a load of nonsense' and feel you've been taken for a fool. And at that point you won't be in a mood to let someone explain that after all there is some substance to it, which up to then no-one had bothered to convey.
My latest for Catholic Answers concerns Shrove Tuesday -- also known as Pancake Day and Fat Tuesday.
In a recent article, I discussed the penitential character of Advent and noted the difficulty of maintaining this while the world seems determined to make the season an anticipatory celebration of Christmas. A similar problem arises in the context of the beginning of Lent—and goes back much farther, historically.
Lent is the Church’s major penitential season. The degree of rigor has varied over the centuries, but in the 1917 Code of Canon Law (CIC), every day of Lent (except Sundays) was a fast day, when we could eat only one full meal and two light meals. (On most of these days, eating meat was permitted.) Earlier in the history of the Church, the Faithful would abstain from not only meat during Lent, but also even eggs and butter.
