Pilgrims, Not Tourists
A (Sort of) Argument for Christendom
On a Saturday morning in Paris in the summer of 2025, 20,000 young Catholics came together to walk the sixty miles to Chartres, the cathedral town that sits on the ancient pilgrimage trail to Santiago de Compostela. These pilgrims—mostly French, but also from all over Europe, and even North and South America—were all devotees of the traditional Latin Mass. These young people (average age, 19) aren’t supposed to exist. They were supposed to have had that old-fashioned Catholicism educated out of them. But there they were, cheerful and devout, prepared to walk in the steps of countless pilgrims from the distant past.
These kids grew up in what sociologist Zygmunt Bauman called “liquid modernity”: a condition in which all the markers of significance and direction in life have been submerged beneath the turbulent flood waters of constant change. They had been freed by their post-Christian culture from any sense of obligation to God, to the past, or to society.
In the past, said Bauman, people experienced life as pilgrims, in the sense that they thought of their lives as a meaningful journey, undertaken together, following a familiar path well-worn by time, past recognized markers to a common destination. Today, though, many live as tourists: guided by nothing other than a wish to escape boredom, flitting here and there as they choose, with no ultimate meaning to their lives.
The Chartres pilgrims were on a quest to shed their tourist identities and become pilgrims again, both literally and metaphorically. Matthew Witzane, a 25-year-old from Canada, may not have read Bauman, but he intuited the sociologist’s meaning, saying, “The difference between a tourist and a pilgrim is that the tourist sees all these beautiful things, but doesn’t see them as pointing towards God. A pilgrim experiences the same beautiful things, but recognizes them as pointing to God.”
An Ark of Stone
There are pilgrimage sites all over Europe, but there is something special about Chartres cathedral. In Universe of Stone, science journalist Philip Ball writes of the Gothic masterpiece: “There are few buildings in the world that exude such a sense of meaning, intention, signification—that tell you so clearly and so forcefully that these stones were put in place according to a philosophy of awesome proportions, appropriate to the lithic immensity of the church itself.”
These latter-day pilgrims were hoping to find re-enchantment beneath the soaring vaults of the cathedral nave. William Cash, a middle-aged Catholic journalist who trekked with the youth, said, “This is not retreat, this is not running for the hills. This is about embracing tradition and making it live in the present.”
As I moved through the crowd at Chartres, listening to Latin liturgical chants broadcast from inside the church over loudspeakers, I noticed groups of pilgrims holding banners honoring saints both familiar and obscure. These pilgrims were laying claim not only to the sanctified past, but to the memory of Christendom.
It would be overstating matters to say that these young people are clear signs of Christian revival on a continent that has been only nominally Christian for well over a century. But who knows? Though relatively small in number, these hope-filled kids might well turn out to be the sparks that set off a new bonfire of evangelization, and indeed a recovery of the West’s ancestral faith, and renew waning belief in the civilization that Christianity built.
The Chartres cathedral stands as a monument to what Christendom once was. These kids glimpse the lighted pathway back to meaning and community. The vast old church is indeed a sheltering fortress and a saving ark floating atop the plain of Beauce, unsinkable and buoyant on the roiling confusion of modernity.
A Common Faith
The 2025 Chartres pilgrimage was the forty-third consecutive trek since its revival. It is dedicated to Our Lady of Christendom. Organizers cast their imagination back to pre-modern times, when “Christendom” meant the nations united, not in governance, but in a common faith that defined itself consciously against non-Christian civilizations, especially those united by its historic rival, Islam.
Rod Dreher is a contributing editor to Touchstone. He is a writer and blogger and the author of several books, including The Benedict Option (2017) and Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents (2020).
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