The small Bavarian town of Altötting, an hour’s drive east of Munich, boasts a vast central square crowded with three churches – two more than you’d find in neighbouring cities, even in this deeply Catholic corner of Germany. But the twin-towered, Gothic hall church pales before the plaza’s main attraction: a small chapel combining Romanesque and Gothic styles that houses a dazzling 15th-century shrine to the Virgin Mary. Its walls are covered with votive paintings celebrating Mary’s intercession with God on behalf of pilgrims. Some of the paintings are centuries old; others were made in the past few years.
It is late November 2007, and Altötting’s mayor, Herbert Hofauer, is due to lead to the shrine a contingent of mayors from five other European shrine-towns: Loreto in Italy, Lourdes in France, Fatima in Portugal, Czestochowa in Poland, Mariazell in Austria. The Shrines of Europe (Shoe) group has gathered at least once a year for a decade, each time gathering at the end of a different route trodden for five centuries by Catholic pilgrims. On this occasion, I am joining them.
The number of those pilgrims has swelled even as churches in Europe suffer the decline of religious observance. As congregations elsewhere thin out, the number of visitors to Lourdes has doubled to more than five million a year during the past half-century. Not that these are all true believers: increasing wealth, faster, cheaper travel and the boons and burdens of globalisation have added to the pilgrims of old a swathe of variously motivated travellers – converts and spiritual seekers, yes, but also culture vultures and curious tourists.
As this new brand of visitors fills the coffers of the Shoe group towns, they also represent a threat. The shrines would lose their relevance if the crowds came only to look, rather than to pray; without divinity, it is harder to compete with the castle down river, the museum a few valleys away. Thus the mayors – true believers and borderline agnostics alike – serve two masters: the worldly needs of their townspeople and the divine mission of the Church.
“So this is what people come to look at?” I ask, gazing on the shrine, a metre-high statue of Mary and the infant Jesus, carved from blackened limewood and covered in a bejewelled robe. Hofauer gazes over his glasses and sternly corrects me: “Surely you mean, ‘is this where people come to pray?’”
The mayoral delegation gathers at the heart of the chapel where parish priest Günther Mandl will celebrate morning mass. In his sermon, Mandl argues that Europe is more than a single market for goods and labour. It is also, sometimes, a place “where heaven and earth meet”. The mayors should remember, he says, “the real goals of pilgrimage: inner renewal and spiritual strength”.
As we file out of the church, Jean-Pierre Artiganave, the mayor of Lourdes, comes striding towards us from the Hotel Post. “Why wasn’t he in church?” I ask Hofauer.
“Why don’t you ask him yourself?” he replies, setting off to the town offices, where Shoe’s official meeting will begin.
Shoe’s working language is French, which Hofauer doesn’t speak, relying instead on a gracefully greying French woman who settled locally. Five of the six mayors speak French or German; Paolo Nicoletti, deputy mayor of Loreto, speaks neither and has brought an assistant who translates into Italian.
After opening remarks from Hofauer, Tadeusz Wrona of Czestochowa rises to speak. A dignified 57-year-old, he updates the group on Polish plans to open a museum to commemorate Pope John Paul II and to document the history of pilgrimages. By far the largest of the Shoe towns, Czestochowa has 250,000 inhabitants. Since the late 14th century, it has been home to the Black Madonna icon, which 4.5 million people travel to southern Poland each year to see.
The reverence with which Wrona speaks underscores the regard his countrymen have for the late pope, but John Paul II is also a special figure for the other shrine towns: as a constant traveller himself, the Polish pope brought new life to the idea of pilgrimage. Travelling to find or to demonstrate faith is almost as old as religion itself – the Greeks and Romans did it, people of many religions still do. For Catholics in the middle ages, the Crusades from the 11th to the 13th centuries were pilgrimages. In the two centuries that followed, more peaceful forms of religious self-assertion came after a spate of visions and miracles led to the creation of the shrines, the majority dedicated to Mary.
Half a millennium later, John Paul II visited all the towns that would one day make up the Shoe group, and formed a particular bond with Fatima in Portugal after an assassination attempt in St Peter’s Square in 1981. The attempt took place on the same day and hour as the first apparition of Mary to three peasant children in Fatima in 1917. The Pope said he felt the Holy Mother looking after him as he fought for his life.
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The end of authoritarian rule in eastern Europe and a new self-confidence on the part of many shrine towns in 1990 saw Lourdes form a partnership with Czestochowa, an initiative led by Lourdes’ then-mayor Philippe Douste-Blazy, who went on to become France’s foreign minister and, last month, was appointed UN special adviser on innovative financing for development. Altötting, Loreto and Fatima joined the alliance in the following years, and Shoe was founded in Czestochowa in 1996. Mariazell joined in 2004. Today, Tadeusz Wrona asks his colleagues if they are able to supply any photographs they have of John Paul II visiting their towns, a suggestion for which he wins ready assent, albeit with much fussing about picture sizes and digital-file types. But Wrona also asks them to consider whether they might “co-operate” in other ways, a statement that draws only a wary silence as his colleagues suspect a request for money.
Artiganave, the mayor of Lourdes, argues that “co-operation” might be awkward for the German contingent, since the new pope, Benedict XVI, is German – and so support for the previous, Polish pope might be seen as inappropriate. “This is a very difficult question for the Germans, whether it’s about financing or not,” he says. Hofauer makes no effort to deny this. Wrona, lips pressed together, remains silent.
Nicoletti then weighs in. Loreto, “as the oldest of the sacred sites here, sees the problem differently”, he says. “The sites are important not because of the importance of the various popes. We should get away from the popes … we should reconnect with our culture.” Loreto, a third of the way down Italy’s Adriatic coast, boasts a relic of Mary’s house in Nazareth and a 15th-century statue of her. Moreover, Nicoletti points out, Descartes, Galileo, Erasmus and Goethe all spent at least a month there. Wrona responds curtly: “John Paul II is also revered as a philosopher and theologian.”
Artiganave, a dark-haired, wiry man of 54 who worked in banking before becoming mayor, later shrugs off these small battles when I prod him about them. “Each of us plays a different role according to the different religious faiths of our countries,” he says. The long-standing separation of church and state in France, for example, means few expect the mayor of Lourdes to attend church regularly. “Of course, there are events where the mayor should be present – and I go. But I’m not particularly practising.”
I ask him whether skipping church this morning was a political act. He laughs and says he was up until 2am with his chef de cabinet catching up on work that piled up in Lourdes as he flew here. “But religion is in the private sphere for us French, not in the public. That’s different, say, for the Poles – for different reasons. I do, however, believe religion is a good basis for people to talk to and understand one another.”
He slowly grinds his cigarette butt into the ground with his heel. “Look,” he says. “About 100,000 ill people come to Lourdes each year, along with about 1.5 million pilgrims on organised trips. The other 4.5 million are what we call ‘religious tourists’, mostly day-trippers. We profit from them. But why do they come? Surely they’re curious, want to discover something about things they don’t know.”
The curious are a growing breed – as is the number of people wishing to cater to them. The German government’s tourism expert, Ernst Hinsken, for example, says the United Nations’ World Tourism Organisation reckons about 150 million people a year travel internationally as religious tourists, and he expects the number to grow by 40 million in the next five years, thanks mostly to travellers interested in the cultural aspects of religious sites.
The mayor of Fatima, David Catarino, thinks Shoe should embrace the changing shape of religious tourism. And Brussels should treat the shrines as “parts of European culture and not exclusively as religious sites”. The 52-year-old teacher tells of how his town, 120km north of Lisbon, has changed from a place of pilgrimage for northern Portuguese into a magnet for a much broader constituency. “Today, it’s a place for pilgrims and a place to which people come to find themselves again … and those aren’t only Catholic pilgrims.”
He goes on: “Traditional places of pilgrimage are increasingly places which people want to visit for cultural as well as religious reasons. We are 50km from the beach. In summer, when it rains there, you can imagine what happens in Fatima.”
Yet for all the beach-goers and cultural tourists now visiting religious sites, the Shoe group’s biggest challenge may be home-grown: Pope John Paul II didn’t just rejuvenate pilgrimage – he also returned the role of pope to cult-like status. Thus, as the shrines become mere tourist attractions, young Catholics might swarm instead to the former homes of living religious figures, like popes.
Just look down the road from Altötting to Marktl. This town of a couple of dozen streets is home to a large stone house with wide eaves in which Josef Alois Ratzinger – now Pope Benedict – was born in April 1927. Marktl’s mayor, Hubert Gschwendtner, who is also headmaster of the local school, says: “We were a pretty peaceful locality until April 19, 2005.” The outcome of the Papal conclave saw annual visitor numbers rise from 2,000 to 200,000 at the last count. Tourists started chipping the plaster off the walls of Ratzinger’s former home, demonstrating an ardour that virtually forced the family living there at the time to sell it to the Church.
Hofauer, Altötting’s mayor, surveys the house, visitor centre and a sculpture that honours the pope’s work. “They’ve done a good job,” he says. “To begin with, Marktl was swept away by a tsunami.” He takes a step towards me. “They also went too commercial, selling ’Pope beer’ and ’Pope sausage’. But that’s died down, luckily. The church didn’t like it.” As we head back to our little convoy, we pass a bakery. Its front window displays a newspaper clipping from spring 2005 about Marktl and its new claim to fame. It is illustrated by a mock-Warhol: multiple portraits of the pope in six colours.
Gerrit Wiesmann is the FT’s Frankfurt correspondent
