The Catholic Thing — Deo volente, and if air traffic disruptions spare me, I’ll be home this morning following a late pilgrimage in America after an over-committed summer. I planned to follow El Camino Real (“The Royal Road”) in California starting from San Diego and heading up north, stopping at several missions mostly founded by Spanish Franciscans, all the way to San Francisco and the final two locations across the bay, San Rafael and Sonoma. The faith is dogma and worship, but it’s also a lived experience of what is still sacred history. Our bishops would have done well to remind us a lot more about the significant, continuing, but now often forgotten, Catholic presence in this land as the nation celebrates its 250th anniversary.
California’s coastal highways and walkways began as 18th-century footpaths, mostly forged by Franciscan friars (a “royal” road only in aspiration back then). Today, California 101 basically traces out what the missionaries carved out on foot. All those saint names up and down the Pacific – and a capital named Sacramento – reflect the long and storied history of the Church’s missionary work in the Americas.
It’s fitting that we started in San Diego because Diego is a variant of the Spanish name for James. That first of the missions recalls the Camino of St. James in Compostela, the most famous of Christian pilgrimages. The missionary friars, though, weren’t on spiritual pilgrimage, but were relentless and intrepid in pursuing the dominical injunction to preach the Gospel to all nations.
Revisionist histories these days often reduce their efforts to mere collaboration in…Read More
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