'They're receiving the Lord in us': Hospitality a hidden buttress of Eucharistic pilgrimage

WALKER, Minn. (OSV News) -- "This will be in our memory forever until we die, this day Jesus came to our house in person," said Donna Ray, standing outside St. Agnes, her parish church in Walker, following mid-afternoon Eucharistic adoration May 21.

St. Agnes was the second stop listed on the National Eucharistic Pilgrimage's Marian Route, but Ray was not talking about her parish. Three hours earlier, the route's eight young adult "perpetual pilgrims," about 50 day pilgrims and Bishop Andrew H. Cozzens of Crookston had stopped for sandwiches and sack lunches at the home of her daughter and son-in-law, Mary and Tim McCarthy, in the middle of a 12-mile procession.

With them was the Eucharist, which was reposed from a monstrance to a tabernacle during the pilgrims' break.

Minnesota's Paul Bunyan State Trail -- a paved rail-trail popular with hikers, cyclists and, in the winter, snowmobilers -- runs behind the McCarthys' house in the woods along Leech Lake's Kabekona Bay. When the family heard the pilgrims would literally go through their backyard on that route's first long public procession, they jumped at the chance to extend hospitality.

This is what Will Peterson had in mind when he launched Modern Catholic Pilgrim, the Minnesota-based nonprofit that organized the National Eucharistic Pilgrimage. Calling the concept "biblical hospitality," Peterson and his team worked with dioceses to find Catholics who could offer places for the pilgrims to stay overnight or provide meals and care in other ways.
This hospitality was a hidden but key support for the pilgrimage, which launched from four edges of the U.S. May 17-18, Pentecost weekend.

From New Haven, Connecticut, in the East, San Francisco in the West, Brownsville, Texas, in the South and Minnesota's Mississippi River headwaters in the North, 30 perpetual pilgrims in their 20s covered, over eight weeks, a combined 6,500 miles over 27 states and 65 dioceses, with hundreds of stops at parishes, universities, Catholic institutions and secular sites along the way.

The pilgrimage was a major component of the three-year National Eucharistic Revival, launched in 2022 by the U.S. bishops to inspire a greater understanding of and love for Jesus in the Eucharist.

The Eucharist -- exposed in a monstrance or reserved in a special tabernacle in the routes' support vans -- was the pilgrims' constant companion. Their daily itineraries included Mass, prayer and worship, Eucharistic adoration and Eucharistic processions, some more than 15 miles long.

Steadily, the four routes zigzagged their way toward Indiana, converging in Indianapolis July 16 for the 10th National Eucharistic Congress, which opened the next day. The five-day event was the first National Eucharistic Congress in 83 years, drawing more than 50,000 Catholics. The two-month pilgrimage was its unprecedented prelude.

Home stays were not just a practical measure, nor a mere cost-saving device for pilgrims on the road for 65 days. The hosts' providing of hospitality -- and the pilgrims' reception of it -- had a scriptural basis that organizers hoped would help shape the pilgrimage experience.

For Peterson, it was important that the National Eucharistic Pilgrimage "show that pilgrimage can be this way, and … we can open our homes to each other and receive each other well and see the fruits of it," he said.

As the pilgrimage progressed through dioceses, Peterson routinely received positive feedback from diocesan coordinators about their hosts' experiences.

"It reaffirms that people want to have this opportunity," he said. "There's this great charism (of hospitality) in the church, but we don't do a great job necessarily of giving people outlets for it. Here's a way that people can continue to connect and serve and encounter Catholics."

Beyond preparing beds and food, or washing laundry, hosts often also shuttled the pilgrims home from their final event in the evening and brought them to their first event the next day. This time in the car proved to be the most effective time for talking, one host said, as pilgrims often arrived late in the evening tired from their day, sometimes with only enough time to prepare for the next morning before sleep.

However, late-night "second dinners" and conversations were common; hosts wanted to learn more about the pilgrimage and what inspired these young adults to participate, share faith stories, and sometimes explore questions about faith and the Eucharist.

On the second day of the pilgrimage, Kai Weiss, a perpetual pilgrim from Germany on the Marian Route, praised the hospitality he and the others had already received in the Bemidji, Minnesota, area, where they attended a regional Eucharistic congress before beginning their journey.

That was thanks to Kathleen Braun, a 74-year-old parishioner of St. Charles Catholic Church in Cass Lake, Minnesota, who provided beds in her home for the route's women perpetual pilgrims, with the men staying nearby in a camper trailer on her land. She and other family members made them meals, drove them to their destinations and sent them off with snacks.

"We did whatever we had to do," she said, noting her amazement of the pilgrims' endeavor, and gratitude that through it she learned more about the National Eucharistic Revival. "We were just there for them."

Four weeks into the pilgrimage, Amayrani Higueldo, a pilgrim from Philadelphia on the Eastern, St. Elizabeth Ann Seton Route, said that "one of our favorite things as a team has been staying at people's homes, and just getting to know them and their stories."

"Everyone has been so generous to us. It's not because of us, it's because they're receiving the Lord in us," she said while traveling through the Diocese of Greensburg, Pennsylvania. "It's been such a gift to be able to experience that welcome, not for us, but for Jesus."

She said that her group had come to think of themselves as "Jesus' little donkeys" carrying their Lord from town to town.

Patrick Fayad, a pilgrim from Omaha, Nebraska, on the Western, St. Junipero Serra Route, also described people's hospitality as "super abundant," even if the actions sometimes seemed simple. Speaking from the Archdiocese of Denver June 12, he noted that morning a person had approached their van to make sure they had meals and lodging covered, and offered water. A few days prior, someone else had handed him electrolytes as he arrived at a church.

Being constantly on the move was a challenge, but he had experienced the most comfortable beds and best tasting meals of his life, he said.

"It's been a huge blessing to us, because we're just the people that are traveling with Jesus, but they really have treated us with the love that they love Christ with, and it's been super beautiful," Fayad said. "The people that we've stayed with have been some of the most inspiring Catholics I've ever encountered, and they've brought profound changes to how I think and love."

The hosts were as diverse as the parish communities the pilgrims visited, and some were not even Catholic. And, like the McCarthys in Minnesota who provided their yard for a lunch break, hospitality took many forms along the way. Along the Southern, St. Juan Diego Route, a boy posted welcome signs in his Louisiana yard for Jesus and gave the pilgrims handmade cards thanking them for walking. Parishes welcomed them with potlucks and spaghetti suppers, cultural dancing and music, and, in suburban Atlanta, a Vietnamese feast followed by karaoke.

Two weeks earlier, women in elaborate, full-skirted Mexican dresses had directed the Juan Diego Route pilgrims to sit so they could wash their feet after a long procession under the Louisiana sun.

“I felt so honored and so humbled to let them wash our stinky, smelly feet,” Shayla Elm, a perpetual pilgrim from North Dakota on the Southern route, said June 21. “It was humbling because you didn’t want to disrespect them in any way, but that’s not what it was about. So these women in these beautiful dresses get down on their knees and wash our feet and massaged our feet, and put powder on them, and put our socks and shoes back on, just like so motherly. Their hearts were so motherly. And it was an extreme moment where I was like, ‘There’s Jesus again, and he can’t help but pour himself out through his faithful.'”

When the Serra Route went through Omaha in June, Christine French, a Catholic high school campus ministry director, hosted three of the female perpetual pilgrims at her home for two nights. The pilgrims shared stories from their route, stories that French later related to others, which spread the impact of the pilgrimage, she said.

"So every home that the pilgrims stay in represents a couple dozen more people who are reached in a more personal way," she said. "It's modeled off what Jesus is doing. … He was kind of with people in a way that's probably kind of exhausting and messy."

A consecrated virgin, French, 35, considers hospitality to be part of her work in the world. "It's making a space for people to be able to encounter Jesus," she said. "In this case with the pilgrims, it was meant to be a space for them to encounter rest with the Lord."

Along the pilgrimage, the men and women pilgrims stayed separately, and the priests and seminarians were often hosted in local rectories. They also sometimes stayed at retreat centers, with religious communities or at Catholic camps. Peterson also saw a value in taking a break from time to time from staying in people's homes, because it gave pilgrims a chance to connect with one another and an opportunity for greater rest.

Those lessons will likely be implemented in next year's Eucharistic pilgrimage from Indianapolis to Los Angeles, which Bishop Cozzens -- board chairman of the National Eucharistic Congress Inc. -- announced on the congress's last day.

Peterson's hope to revive a culture of biblical hospitality extends beyond the National Eucharistic Pilgrimage, which is just one facet of Modern Catholic Pilgrim's work. He also employs the idea in the smaller, regional multi-day pilgrimages his team organizes across the country.

With the success of the National Eucharistic Pilgrimage, he said, "I'm hopeful that it means that we've got more people and dioceses and parishes who are going to be receptive to having young adults come through … and willing to open the doors and continue to learn what it is to have the pilgrims receive that hospitality as well."