The ways in which we use the word pilgrimage have changed so much during my lifetime. And yet, I realise increasingly, the core of what it articulates remains the same.
It began for me at the age of 17. I was the latest in a long line at my Catholic boys’ school to pile into a minibus and go on pilgrimage to Lourdes, organised and supervised by my Christian Brother teachers. They get a bad press, and worse, nowadays, often justifiably on account of the young lives some of them betrayed by their abuse, but not the two who took us to Lourdes. Over those few days in the summer of 1980, they opened my eyes to something that has kept drawing me back ever after.
