In its issue of August 7, 2014, the influential German news magazine Der Spiegel published a story about pilgrims on the Camino de Santiago (the Way of St. James), which for centuries has been the route of a pilgrimage ending in the town of Compostela in the northwest of Spain. Its cathedral is believed to contain the remains of the apostle Santiago/St. James the Greater (I don’t know what happened to the body of St. James the Lesser). Santiago, one of the Apostles, is supposed to have been martyred in Jerusalem, after which his remains were for some reason transported to Compostela. When the cult of Santiago began, Spain was a territory fought over by Christians and Muslims (Moors); the saint became a patron of the Christian reconquest of Spain (reconquista); he is rather embarrassingly still known as Santiago Matamoros/St. James, Killer of Moors. The town came to be called Santiago de Compostela, the destination of pilgrims ever since the 9th century. The pilgrimage was very popular throughout the Middle Ages, then was rarely undertaken for several centuries. There has been a rising interest since the 1980s and 1990s, with the number of pilgrims growing from year to year—in 2013 there were over 200,000. They now come from all over the world, the largest group of foreigners consisting of Germans (they know the Camino as the Jakobsweg). A book about it is currently a bestseller in Germany and a German television documentary is about to be shown. The pilgrims are a heterogeneous crowd—of different nationalities and religious backgrounds, young and old, coming with different motives.
Catholics are probably in the minority now. (The Spiegel article did not pay much attention to them, reflecting an anti-Catholic bias that has characterized the magazine ever since its foundation by Rudolf Augstein right after World War II.) Of course there continue to be pious Catholics among the pilgrims—they obtain a plenary indulgence (forgiveness of sins) for undertaking the pilgrimage in a sincere spirit of devotion, there are chapels and even a Benedictine monastery along the Camino for the spiritual care of the faithful, and there is a solemn Mass in the cathedral to be attended at the conclusion of the pilgrimage. Thus there is a religious continuity between Catholic pilgrims today and those a thousand years ago—a source of inspiration and comfort for believers.
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