This talk was first given On November 15th 2008 at St Mary-the-Virgin, Kenton, Middlesex as part of the Our Lady on Saturday series of talks given in cooperation with the Ecumenical Society of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

NE OF MY teenage longings was to visit the Shrine of Our Lady of Lourdes. As a youngster I had come across Franz Werfel's book, The Song of Bernadette, though I have never seen the film, and I had bought The Voice of Lourdes - A Pilgrimage in Vision and Recorded Sound, published in 1962. The 'sound' took the form of two rather small LPs, one at each end of the book. I must have been fourteen or fifteen and, though I hoped to go to Lourdes one day, I should never have guessed that it would take me another 45 years to get round to it. The small miracle is that I finally got round to it: claustrophobia has made me a timid traveller - an irony, given my present job - and it has been this year, the year of my 60th birthday, that I have finally managed to go not only to Lourdes, but earlier in the year to Rome. A small miracle, much assisted by the Society of Mary, and, of course, by Our Lady herself. I am conscious that amongst you may be seasoned travellers, experienced pilgrims and people who are very familiar indeed with what, for me, was entirely new. There will be an opportunity later to add to these somewhat random thoughts from a novice in these matters.

A Series of Snapshots
Avoiding the trap of excessive autobiography and anecdote, I hope, after a few general remarks and a brief reflection on the business of gaining indulgences, I shall focus in these reflections on a series of snapshots.One is a glimpse of how you do pilgrimage. Others are reflections on some of the events of this particular pilgrimage, a pilgrimage organised by the Society of Mary and the Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham in this, the 150th anniversary year of the apparitions. I then shall mention a few other Marian encounters - not places of apparitions but places visited during the journey to Lourdes: Rocamadour (on the way down), Bétharram (whilst we were in Lourdes) and Chartres and Rouen on the way home. Finally I shall reflect on where Anglo-Catholics find themselves at this time: the pilgrimage of 500 people, ten of whom were Church of England bishops and one of whom was the Archbishop of Canterbury, was something of a milestone in the larger pilgrimage, the People of God in search of God's Kingdom.

To put the pilgrimage into context, this was one of a series of jubilee pilgrimages, during the year, fostered and sponsored by Lourdes: the one before ours had had the Pope as its principal attraction; ours was timed to centre on the feast of Our Lady of Walsingham, Wednesday 24th September, a feast which, for English and Welsh Catholics is comparatively new. (The new English liturgical Calendar was recognised by the Holy See as recently as 2000). Our Lady of Walsingham is a memoria, for the most part, though, in appropriate circumstances, as this year at Lourdes, it was celebrated as a solemnity. We had arrived a couple of days earlier - on the Monday - and we all left for home on Friday. It was an ecumenical pilgrimage in the sense that we were Anglicans going to a Roman Catholic Shrine and doing there separately what Anglicans perforce do separately, and what we specifically wanted to do, as well as joining in, as far as we were able, in the rhythm of the place.

I had been warned to expect not a rural retreat but a busy little town, at the foot of the Pyrenees, with almost as many hotel rooms as Paris and more than enough statues of Our Lady of Lourdes on sale, it seemed, to furnish every home on earth with at least one in each room. I was expecting garish junk and high prices, tat and tawdriness, but, in the end, none of that bothered me. One felt served, and not exploited, by the townsfolk and, if it was not all to my taste, that is because it was not all for me. Croatians and Italians, Dutch and German, French and Polish, Filipino and Flemish: here was a place of international Catholic pilgrimage in which our very Anglicanism seemed unknown, unnoticed and untroubling.

Plenary Indulgences
Perhaps the first challenge to our Anglicanism was to use the Upper Basilica, on 22nd September, and the Rosary Basilica - the lower basilica - on 23rd September for our masses.There we were in the sanctuary, as though it belonged to us, with Italians and others crowding in at the back to catch a glimpse, not because we were Anglicans but because here was a sung mass, Novus Ordo, and a sung mass is one of the treasures of the Faith. We were further challenged because the first mass had to be over in an hour and, as you know, the shortest we Anglo-Catholics can ever do a sung mass in is one hour and ten minutes, and there were a few too many of us to manage the shortest of times. A stronger challenge, undoubtedly, was posed by the invitation to pilgrims to take part in the Jubilee Way, acquiring a plenary indulgence, thereby, after Confession and Holy Communion. Some of us had lunch at the Lourdes residence of the Bishop of Tarbes and Lourdes and I was amused by the conversation of some of the priests and religious who staff Lourdes in which they were discussing why we still have indulgences, what a 'plenary indulgence' might mean and whether it was something you could have for yourself or had to apply in charity to someone else, presumably one of the Faithful Departed.I was astonished by the vagueness of some of these professional penitentiary personages on this key subject but thought it would have been rude to point them to the fourth edition of the Enchiridio Indulgentiarum, published as recently as 1999. (I myself knew of this but my know-all-ish precision at this point betrays a little poking around on the internet once I got home). What I am not certain of - and my indulgence circle, with each of its four quadrants covered somewhat ineptly by a sticker acquired at each of the jubilee stations continues to hang in my oratory whilst I think on - is whether Confession and Holy Communion in the Anglican tradition will suffice to complete a plenary ind ulgence, given, that is, that the Anglican tradition has had no truck with indulgences these last five hundred years.

How you do Pilgrimage
Moving on to complete the first of my objectives in this talk, I shall attempt to provide a glimpse of how you do pilgrimage. Here I have nothing startling or original to say: the model for pilgrimage is clearly the journey of the People of God towards the Promised Land, the subject of the Book of Exodus. That journey has been seen as a paradigm of the life of the Covenant people, more or less ever since it took place. Certainly the psalms are full of it, and the prophets resound with it. The Babylonian Captivity is another Egypt, filled with longings for another Exodus. The Christian story has been enriched by it: the journey of the baptised Christian towards the true homeland has been seen as a Pilgrim's Progress not just by John Bunyan. St Bernard of Cluny, in the famous hymn of the twelfth century, says

O sweet and blessed country,
Shall I ever see thy face? 1

A little earlier, Peter Abelard says:

We for that country must yearn and must sigh,
Seeking Jerusalem, dear native land,
Through our long exile on Babylon's strand. 2

And if we want convincing that this is not also a more recent sentiment, suffice it to say that J M Neale thought both hymns worth translating.

But what is fascinating is that, whereas the Catholic focus is on where we are heading for on pilgrimage - the sweet and blessed country, Jerusalem our dear native land - ('native', notice - it is where we are born), the Jewish focus is on where we have escaped from.It is the Book of Exodus not the Book of Ingress. 'When Israel came out of Egypt', sings the psalm, not 'When Israel crossed the Jordan'. Pilgrimage, in that Jewish sense, is a journey of some arduousness, away from what is known and what is known to be enslaving, towards something which is scarcely known but which is beyond all description. Something similar is there in the evangelical tradition, where the reference is more often to what happened for me on the cross - the point of slavery and death - rather than what will happen to me when I take my place at the banquet. Either way, looking backwards or forwards, there is an intense preoccupation with the journey, as well as with where one has escaped from and that for which one is heading. So pilgrimage is about the journey, about the going.

Unsurprisingly we find extremely arduous journeys in the tradition: going on foot to Jerusalem in the Middle Ages, travelling on the Pilgrim's Way to Santiago de Compostela. However what has now been lost, largely, is that sense of the arduous journey - which is at the heart of pilgrimage. Sarah Boss talks about this in her essay on Sacred Space: 3 'the very word "travel" is cognate with the word "travail",' she says, 4 as she tells us about mountain shrines in Núria and Vassivière, until modern times unreachable in winter months. There was no route to Composela which was not arduous and, as Boss describes, the full route led to Finisterra on the Atlantic Coast, which led one modern pilgrim to understand entirely the quintessential arduousness of pilgrimage. 5

Arduousness is very much still there in secular culture.Those who sail round the world single-handed, climb Everest, go on space-flights, and so forth, are the inheritors, in some ways of the pilgrim tradition. If you doubt that, then ask whether, say, Christopher Columbus would have been able to distinguish between pilgrimage and adventure. I am sure, in that day and age, he would have seen his journey as having ingredients of both. (I am not sure I know enough about Columbus to make this point authoritatively but what I sense is the mediaeval pilgrimage tradition merging into the adventurousness and inquisitiveness of Renaissance Man. And if it isn't there in Columbus then it is certainly there in the missionaries whose work began in earnest in that era. One of the charming, and more authentic, aspects of the Walsingham pilgrimages is that our cross country journeys to North Norfolk are often so long and tiresome. I'm sure that those returning from Lourdes, whose flight was delayed at the last minute for the best part of a day, and who arrived back in England during the night rather than, as they expected, midday, were, amidst the frustration, being given an extra glimpse of pilgrimage and an extra blessing. There needs to be something of the howling wilderness in it, even if, as in my case, the 'howling' is more about interior anxiety than about exterior obstacles. (I certainly couldn't pretend that the suite I occupied in the four-star Hotel Eliseo was in any sense 'the howling wilderness').

The Events of the Lourdes Pilgrimage
I had arrived in Lourdes - as, no doubt, others on the Society of Mary Pilgrimage had - with a shopping list of sick people. The local vicar - an open evangelical - had given me, with typical openness, a list of the sick of the parish. My driver, Alan, drove the Bishop of Richborough and me to Lourdes whilst his own father was at a clinic in Mexico seeking a cure to an inoperable cancer. So I was duly remembering Ken. Then - and most pressing of all for me - was the case of John, a parish priest in his forties, and Hilary, a bishop's wife, both of whom were suffering from cancer, possibly terminally. And, as on every priest's list, there was a whole collection of names, some known personally to me, others not, for whom I am asked to pray. This was what I had to do - pray for these people - I knew when I arrived.

What I had not bargained for was how busy the programme would be.I have mentioned the opening Mass on Monday in the Upper Basilica followed by the Procession to the Grotto. On the first full day, Tuesday, there was Morning Prayer, outdoor Stations of the Cross on the hillside, a 5pm Sung Mass in the Rosary Basilica - the main, ground floor church - and, in the evening, a Torchlight Procession in which, movingly, the Guardians of the Anglican Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham, accompanied her image, carried alongside that of Our Lady of Lourdes. That left the afternoon for our devotions - and we were encouraged to make the Jubilee Way, visiting each of the local Bernadette sites, walking along the special blue line showing the way. This proved hopeless. One of the sites - the parish church - was fully occupied in funeral liturgy, to the exclusion of pilgrims. Other sites drew huge queues. Having acquired our first sticker at the Grotto on the Monday night, those of us who were fortunate enough to be able to score another sticker on the Tuesday afternoon were doing well but, even for us, the Jubilee Way was only half complete and there would not be another gap in the programme. Visitors to Lourdes in this Jubilee Year are expected to number eight million, up from the normal six million. For comparison's sake, that is about a quarter of the number of visitors that the casinos and other tourist attractions of Las Vegas draws each year - 75% of the 35 million annual visitors to Las Vegas are for what are euphemistically called 'the leisure industry', 25% for trade fairs. However much religion is big business, mammon is bigger business.

If Tuesday 23rd September was busy, Wednesday 24th September was even busier.We began with the International Mass of the Solemnity of Our Lady of Walsingham in the Underground Basilica of St Pius X. The Principal Celebrant was Cardinal Kasper and the Archbishop of Canterbury was the preacher. Seeing them walk in together at the end of the vast procession was a moving reminder of what might have been - what should have been - what, in the mysterious Providence of God, might still become - the reconciliation of Anglicans, some Anglicans at least, with the Holy See. Almost as moving was the inclusion of Anglican bishops, in choir dress, in the procession. We bishops were invited to kiss the altar and some of us to asperge the pilgrims at the mass. I had a quarter of the congregation of 16,000 to cover and, particularly significant for me, the bucket bearer, whose name was also Andrew, was a man of my own age who fifty years ago had grown up with me at Worksop Priory. No less moving was the involvement of one of our own deacons in the liturgy - and later on in the day at Benediction. Here indeed was an ecumenical vision, a glimpse of what Christ prayed for. I shall have more to say about this in a moment or two. Meanwhile here, in the international assembly, a gathering of all nations, was a glimpse of the heavenly banquet, the peace and unity of the kingdom for which we pray at every mass.

Later in the day there would be an ecumenical conference, at which I rather noisily and noticeably fell asleep several times, a Blessed Sacrament Procession, again with Cardinal Kasper and Archbishop Williams side by side, a Pilgrimage Reception and an evening meal out at Bartres, the village where Bernadette worked as a shepherdess.Given that we would be on our return journey on Friday morning, that left Thursday for uncompleted tasks. Having elected to go on the coach trip to the Marian shrine at Bétharram on Thursday afternoon, I had to go AWOL on Thursday morning - missing the Liturgy of Reconciliation and Devotion at the Grotto - simply to gain my stickers and complete the Jubilee Way. That was a difficult decision. No less difficult was deciding on Thursday evening not to take part again in the Torchlight Procession but to use the time to go to the Grotto to light candles and pray for my shopping list. Both decisions were blessed: the morning gave me the space I needed to be there journeying on my own, and I shall always remember the Gregorian chant at the Mass in the Parish Church I stumbled upon, as I finally gained access there. A group of Benedictine monks - presumably visitors - were singing their capitular mass. I shall remember too chatting with Croatians as I queued to see 'the Cachot', the house in Lourdes where Bernadette lived with her parents. Catching up on the intercession in the evening, it was, of course, extremely helpful that the Rosary of the Torchlight Procession was going on in the background, as I made my way to the Grotto and said my prayers, touching the very rock where Mary Immaculate appeared, and on the very spot where the well of healing water was discovered. One of my opportunities, travelling by car, was to bring a gallon of water home: those who were travelling by air are allowed very small quantities indeed and I have been able to help the Milton Keynes Ebbsfleet clergy at least.

Other Marian Encounters
On the way to Lourdes, the Bishop of Richborough and I stopped at Rocamadour, north of Toulouse. And, as I have already mentioned, we visited Bétharram whilst we were in Lourdes. On the way home we called at Chartres and Rouen. Each of these holy places deserves its own talk, not least because they point to much more ancient traditions than Lourdes, but here we have time for only a brief word about each and a short reflection on their cumulative effect on the pilgrim. The legend of Rocamadour begins with the discovery in 1166 of the body of St Amadour, traditionally identified as a servant of the Holy Family, and as Zaccheus of the Gospel and husband of Veronica. The shrine reached its apogee in the fifteenth century, when the magnificent shrine church was completed, perched halfway up a cliff, 216 steps up from the lower town. This spectacular site drew kings and saints, and the cult of the Black Madonna of Rocamadour flourished, based on a statue made by St Amadour in his hermitage. At first it seems to be a place where credulity triumphs: the legends, after all, are extraordinarily implausible to modern ears. And yet it is the place where the modern French composer, Francois Poulenc, was converted, a numinous place, then, of immense spiritual power.

Bétharram is somewhat later, a seventeenth century building in the Spanish Baroque style, on a fourteenth century site destroyed by the Huguenots. For the modern pilgrim, the foundational story of Bétharram is again much less compelling than the story of Lourdes, and yet, ironically, Bernadette was sent here by the Bishop in 1858 to meet St Michel Garicoits, founder of the Order of the Sacré-Coeur of Bétharram who still run the sanctuary. It seemed that this young girl, with her tall story, needed to be subjected to the wise judgment of an authentic servant of the cult of Mary.

Chartres and Rouen, on our return journey, both have cathedrals dedicated to Notre-Dame. Our Lady, Mother of Christians, is, of course, an archetype of the Church, and nothing could be more appropriate than for a cathedral of Our Lady to be the Mother Church of the diocese. But Chartres, at least, offers more than this. The relic of the Sancta Camisia, locked away except for a fragment in a nineteenth century reliquary, is thought to be the cloak of Mary. Some medieval sources say that it was worn at the Annunciation, others that it was worn at the birth of Christ. The camisia was given by the Empress Irene of Byzantium to Charles the Bald, King of the Franks, in 876. Why Chartres? Notre-Dame de Paris was not yet built. Surviving many fires at Chartres unharmed, the Sancta Camisia was taken as a sign that a new and beautiful cathedral should be built to honour the Virgin Mother.

These 'Marian Encounters' are at places where the anthropologist would say that 'the veil between heaven and earth is slightly pulled aside, so that the pilgrim gains a little glimpse of the Other World, the Heavenly Realm'. 6 Quite often the surroundings - the cliff at Rocamadour, the beautiful valley at Bétharram, the flat landscape on which the cathedral Chartres seems to sail like a huge ship on the sea, the grandeur of Rouen, majestic amidst a great city - are already preparing one to see beyond the veil. The Bishop of Richborough and I, in some ways, went indeed beyond the veil, by gaining access to the Sancta Camisia, locked away behind the High Altar in Chartres. Were we stretching into eternity by touching this ancient relic? What was - and is - clear is that the cumulative Marian devotion of the journey, and sense of piety, exceeded, and ultimately did not depend upon, the various folk fables or legends which made these shrines what they were and are. Which is not to say that Lourdes is based on a fable or legend: the then Bishop of Tarbes, Monsignor Laurence, has been succeeded by a Bishop of Tarbes and Lourdes, Monsignor Perrier, and Holy Church has lent her authority to the miracles of Lourdes as a testimony to the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin.

Anglo-Catholics and the Pilgrimage to Church Unity
The most painful part of the pilgrimage, it has to be said, was the feeling of praying apart from Peter. We were a surreal Anglican delegation: all the Church of England bishops were from the Catholic tradition, nearly all 'traditionalists,' in the usual sense of that word; nearly all the pilgrims, it seemed, were 'traditionalists,' even those from parishes in the West and South-West that apparently had not heard of the Bishop of Ebbsfleet! Cardinal Kasper must have been aware that most Anglicans would not come on pilgrimage to Lourdes on principle and that, of those who would, most Anglicans would be happier if women clergy had played a full part. He must have been aware too that even those of us who, as Anglicans, accept the doctrine of the Immaculate Conceptions do so not because that is what our church teaches us but because it is what the Church - to which we do not fully belong - teaches us. Just over fifteen years ago - and certainly thirty years ago - it all felt very different. The Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission (ARCIC) was encouraging heady optimism and, at last, it felt as though there was general convergence. It seemed likely, as recently as 1982, when the Pope came to England, that the Anglican and Roman Catholic traditions would unite before the millennium.

Nevertheless a pilgrimage of 500 people, ten of whom were Church of England bishops and one of whom was the Archbishop of Canterbury, was something of a milestone in the larger pilgrimage, the People of God in search of God's Kingdom. I was reminded of the Walsingham Festival in York Minster a year or two ago: the House of God, on that occasion, was overflowing with people of what is wretchedly known as 'both integrities' 7 and, for a moment, we could see what it might mean to belong to one another once more. That was certainly the experience of the Society of Mary Pilgrimage to Lourdes: drawn by Mary into faithful and obedient discipleship, Catholics and Anglicans could walk and worship together. Nonetheless, honesty requires that it be seen and known to be a flashback to an earlier vision and that more radical steps will be needed by Anglo-Catholics if we are to recover the impetus and urgency of the ecumenical quest. Flashback to an earlier vision it may be - that is what all reflections are, not least these 'Reflections on an Ecumenical Pilgrimage to Lourdes' - but flashbacks and reflections can also give a glimpse of what might be. Will the day come when those bishops, priests, deacons and lay people, presently apart from Peter, gather with the Church throughout the world and throughout time, not only to stand at the Lord's table but to share in his banquet?

Andrew Burnham, Bishop of Ebbsfleet
Dry Sandford, 12th November 2008, St Josaphat

1 Urbs Sion aurea ('Jerusalem the Golden', English Hymnal 412)
2 O quanta qualia sunt illa Sabbata ('O what their joy and their glory must be', English Hymnal 465)
3 Sarah Jane Boss, 'Jerusalem, Dwelling of the Lord: Marian Pilgrimage and its Destination' in eds. P and J North, Sacred Space, House of God, Gate of Heaven, Continuum, 2007.
4 Sarah Boss, op. cit., p. 136
5 Sarah Boss, op. cit., p. 148
6 Sarah Boss, op. cit., p 142, is referring to the work of V Turner and E Turner, in Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture, OUP, 1978, pp 1-39.
7 that is, accepting and not accepting women's ordination to the priesthood and episcopate.

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