Elias Levy Benarroch – Santander – Spain.
This Christmas, the Christian world is celebrating the beginning of a new jubilee year in which it hopes to boost pilgrimages to holy places with a message of “hope” for an increasingly materialistic world plagued by conflict. The Jubilee of 2025 will be inaugurated by Pope Francis when he opens the Holy Door of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome this Christmas Eve, ushering in a period of indulgences for the faithful.
The Church also wants to take advantage of this opportunity to relaunch “pilgrimage”, as opposed to “religious tourism”, which it interprets as a generic expression without content because it is “everything and nothing”. “The Church has been talking for many years about the ‘Pastoral of tourism’. Our task is not to organise trips, or walks, or to travel around the world. We are dedicated to the evangelisation of the world of tourism”, explained the Reverend Gustavo Riveiro, head of the Department of Pastoral of Tourism of the Spanish Episcopal Conference (CEE), at an international meeting in Cantabria, in the north of Spain.
In the beautiful medieval town of Potes, in a valley between the snowy peaks of the Picos de Europa, the religious man of Argentine origin and parish priest of Paiporta (ground zero of the recent floods in Valencia), stressed that “religious tourism is awakening enormous interest in the Church” and that “our task is pastoral, not structural. This does not mean that the Church does not organize trips, such as the pilgrimage to the Holy Land, but that is not our task. Ours is pastoral.”
BOOMING SECTOR
Speaking to Aurora, Riveiro announced that next month he will participate in a conference on pilgrimage to the Holy Land organized by the Israel Tourism Office in Spain on the occasion of the FITUR Fair, to be held in Madrid from January 22 to 26. But he added that as long as the war situation in the area persists, it will be difficult to specify a strategy because nobody likes to go to conflict zones.
Religious tourism, in its broadest sense, has experienced an exponential boom in recent years, and according to the World Tourism Organization (UNWTO), more than 330 million people undertake this type of travel around the world, out of a total of more than 1.400 billion tourists annually. It is more difficult to know its true market potential, and although specialized agencies and think tanks estimate an annual growth of between 6 and 8 percent, they do not agree on the income it generates. Minimalists estimate it at tens of billions of dollars a year. Maximalists at hundreds of billions or even more.
To give an example. By 2024, 95 million tourists are expected to have visited Spain, of which 17%, according to Antonio Santos del Valle, president of the think tank “Tourism and Society” and one of the organizers of the Cantabria meeting, can be classified as “religious tourism”. If its direct and indirect income from tourism rose to 2023 billion euros (180.000% of GDP) in 12,8, the relevant part of religious tourism would represent about 23.000 billion. And remember that the city of “Santiago de Compostela (in Galicia) receives more tourists than many countries in the world. It is the sum of many destinations, and not only international tourism, but also national tourism”.
Among the great icons of spiritual or religious tourism in Spain are also the pilgrimages of El Rocío and the Virgen de la Cabeza, Liébana, Covadonga, Monserrat, and the popular Holy Week in Andalusia. But they are by no means the only ones.
INTERNATIONAL MEETING
The international meeting in Cantabria, also promoted by the World Network of Religious and Spiritual Tourism Destinations, brought together more than 30 clergymen, tourism experts and journalists from a dozen countries, and had as its background the so-called Camino Lebaniego, a branch of the Camino de la Costa to Santiago de Compostela that extends from the sea to the Monastery of Santo Toribio, in the Picos de Europa.
In its approximately 70 kilometres, there is a great diversity of landscapes from the Cantabrian coast to the mountains of the north of the peninsula, passing through gorges and places of impressive natural and historical beauty. Its picturesque villages and churches, many of them medieval, are living witnesses of a past that has bequeathed us a rich cultural and religious heritage, which the Camino Lebaniego Foundation tries to promote as a spiritual and faith destination.
THE LARGEST RELIC OF THE CROSS
The final prize of this multi-day pilgrimage: caressing and kneeling before the “Lignum Crucis” (“wooden cross”) that Saint Toribio of Astorga brought to Spain from the Holy Land. It is the largest known fragment of the cross that Saint Helena, mother of the Roman Emperor Constantine, found in Jerusalem in the 63th century: “She made fragments, left one in Jerusalem, another in Rome and another in Constantinople. The piece here, from the left arm of the cross, corresponds to the fragment from Jerusalem and is 39 cm high by XNUMX cm long.” explains to Aurora the director of the Foundation, Pilar Gómez Bahamonde.
(Photo: Elias Levy Benarroch)
The wood, made of Cupressus sempervirens (Mediterranean cypress), is dated to more than 2.000 years ago according to the analyses carried out, and today it is protected in a cruciform statuette made of gilded silver so that it does not suffer any damage, especially after the incredible journey that, according to tradition, it made from Jerusalem. “It arrived here because Saint Toribio (SV) brought it to protect it. The Patriarch gave it to him in Jerusalem. On his return, Toribio passed through Rome and with the consent of the Pope this relic was granted to him for his city. With the Muslim invasion of Spain (from 711), Christians from Astorga took the relics and crossed the mountains to the north until they arrived here at a monastery in the Picos de Europa: a stronghold in which to leave it safe,” says Gómez. “For us this is a direct testimony of a treasure of Christianity that has been guarded among these mountains for more than 1.000 years. It is a stronghold of religiosity and spirituality," he stresses.
There are only four Jubilee Years declared in the Middle Ages: Jerusalem, Rome, Santiago de Compostela and the Monastery of Santo Toribio.
RETURNING THE ESSENCE OF FAITH TO HERITAGE
Like other similar routes, the pilgrimage to this medieval Cantabrian monastery is a symbiosis of personal experiences of a spiritual nature, but also of earthly contemplation. Santos del Valle explains, in this sense, that “religious destinations are normally historical, which means that they mix culture, heritage, identity and religion” but “when we talk about religious tourism, the objective of the tourist is to visit a space related to the entire ecosystem of religion or spirituality.”
And the Church wants to foster this spirit through a series of measures that, for example, help to convey to visitors the essence of the heritage they are visiting. “When someone goes to a religious building and is explained a painting, they have to feel the Christian faith and understand it. There is no need to catechize, but to show the truth for which that particular work was created. That is my mission,” said the Reverend Pablo Delclaux Muller, director of the Department of Cultural Heritage at the CEE, at the meeting. The prelate stressed that “it is not about evangelizing or catechizing, but about explaining the Christian truth from the point of view of the artist who created that work.”
Strategies and measures applicable to almost any confession and which seek to ensure that the pilgrim enjoys the journey and reconnects with his faith because, ultimately, spiritual and physical “rest” has the divine commandments as a source of inspiration.