Christian Pilgrimage Sites Worldwide

1. Why Christianity Has Holy Places

Christianity has holy places because Christian belief is anchored to particular events that happened at particular coordinates. The Word became flesh and dwelt among us (John 1:14), which means a specific woman said yes in a specific town, a child was born in a specific village, a man was executed outside the wall of a specific city and was buried in a specific tomb. A religion whose central claim is a set of historical events will inevitably care about where those events took place.

This is older than Christianity. The instinct to mark ground where God has acted runs through the Hebrew Scriptures. Moses is told to take off his sandals at the burning bush because the place he is standing is holy ground (Exodus 3:5). Jacob wakes at Bethel and says that the Lord is in this place and he did not know it, then sets up the stone he had slept on as a pillar (Genesis 28:16 to 22). Israel was commanded to appear before the Lord three times a year at the place he would choose (Deuteronomy 16:16), and the Songs of Ascents were sung by people walking up to it. Jesus himself was taken to Jerusalem every year for Passover (Luke 2:41).

The objection Jesus himself raised

Any honest treatment of holy places has to face the conversation at the well in Samaria. The woman asks which mountain is the right one for worship, Gerizim or Jerusalem, and Jesus tells her that the hour is coming when true worshippers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, and that the Father seeks such worshippers (John 4:21 to 24). Christian critics of pilgrimage have quoted that passage for sixteen centuries, and it deserves a straight answer rather than a deflection.

The Catholic answer is that Christ is relativising the old rivalry between competing cult centres, and he is not abolishing the significance of place. The same Gospel that records those words also records the Incarnation, the empty tomb and the disciples walking to a named village called Emmaus. Gregory of Nyssa, writing in the fourth century after visiting Jerusalem, told his readers plainly that changing your location does not bring you closer to God, and he still made the journey. The Church has held both halves ever since: God is not more present at a shrine, and a shrine can still be the place where a particular person finally pays attention.

The sacramental principle

Behind Catholic holy places lies the sacramental principle, the conviction that God ordinarily works on human beings through material things. Water, bread, wine, oil and the laying on of hands are the primary instances. Churches, images, relics and shrines are secondary instances of the same logic. A God who chose to save the world through a body has no difficulty using a building, a road or a spring of water.

The practical consequence is that pilgrimage is a bodily act. Walking, kneeling, queuing, touching a stone, lighting a candle and getting tired are the substance of it. That is why the Church has never treated pilgrimage as an inferior form of devotion for people who cannot manage abstraction. The meaning and practice of pilgrimage is covered in its own guide, which sets out the definition, the history of the practice and what the Church attaches to it. This page is about the places themselves.

2. The Five Grounds a Place Becomes Holy

Look at any long list of Christian shrines and the same five reasons keep recurring. A place enters the tradition because something happened there in the life of Christ, because a saint is buried there, because a relic is kept there, because an apparition or private revelation is associated with it, or because a miracle was reported there and investigated. Most of the great destinations rest on two or three of these at once, which is part of why they became great.

An event in the life of Christ

The first ground, and the one behind the earliest Christian sites. Bethlehem, Nazareth, the Jordan, the Sea of Galilee, the Mount of Olives, the Cenacle, Calvary and the tomb are all here. Nothing about them depends on a later vision or a later miracle. They are venerated because the Gospels place events at them, and because in several cases continuous local memory, later confirmed by excavation, identifies the spot.

The tomb of a saint

The second ground, and historically the most productive of shrines. Christians gathered at the graves of the martyrs from the second century, celebrating the Eucharist on the anniversary of the death, which they called the martyr's birthday. When the Church could build in the open after Constantine, it built over those graves. Rome's principal churches sit on cemeteries. Santiago de Compostela grew around a tomb identified as that of the Apostle James. Assisi, Padua, Canterbury, Tours and Cologne all began the same way.

A relic kept in place

Where a saint's body could not stay in one place, part of it, or something connected with it, was carried elsewhere and a shrine grew there instead. This is how the map of Christian holy places thickened across Europe in the early Middle Ages. It is also the ground most open to abuse, and the Church has legislated repeatedly against the trade in relics.

An apparition or private revelation

The most recent of the five, and the one that produced most of the shrines a modern reader can name. A visionary reports an appearance, usually of the Virgin Mary, the local Church investigates, devotion is permitted, and a sanctuary is built. This ground carries the most confusion about what Church approval does and does not mean, and section 6 below treats it carefully.

A reported and investigated miracle

Eucharistic miracles, healings and images that behaved unexpectedly have all founded shrines. The Church's discipline here is conservative. A healing at Lourdes, for example, passes through a medical bureau and an international committee before any ecclesiastical declaration is even considered, and the number formally recognised over more than a century and a half is small.

The legal category on top

Alongside the historical grounds sits a canonical one. The Code of Canon Law defines a shrine as a church or other sacred place to which numerous members of the faithful make pilgrimage for a special reason of piety, with the approval of the local ordinary. It then distinguishes diocesan shrines, approved by the diocesan bishop, national shrines, approved by the conference of bishops, and international shrines, whose statutes are approved by the Holy See. A place can be historically significant without holding any of those titles, and holding one of them is a statement about pastoral governance rather than about the truth of the underlying story.

Source for the canonical definitions: the 1983 Code of Canon Law, canons 1230 and 1231, available in full on vatican.va. The description above summarises the canons and is not a quotation of them.

3. How the Practice Began

Christian travel to holy places becomes visible in the documents in the fourth century. That is a matter of evidence rather than of origins. Christians almost certainly visited the sites of the Gospel events earlier, and there is second-century testimony to local memory of the cave at Bethlehem, but under persecution such travel left few traces. Once Christianity was legal, the traffic appears in the record all at once.

The fourth-century turn

Constantine built. The Church of the Nativity at Bethlehem and the complex at the site of Christ's tomb in Jerusalem both belong to his reign, and the Jerusalem basilica was dedicated in 335. His mother, the empress Helena, travelled to Palestine in the 320s, and the tradition of the finding of the True Cross attaches to that journey. A destination existed, and it was imperially endorsed.

Two travellers give us the first-hand texture. An anonymous pilgrim from Bordeaux left an itinerary of a journey to Palestine and back in 333, a dry road log of stopping places that is still the earliest surviving Christian travel document of its kind. Half a century later a woman named Egeria, probably from Spain or Gaul, wrote long letters home describing the liturgies she attended in Jerusalem across the church year. Her account is the reason we know what Holy Week looked like in fourth-century Jerusalem, and it reads like a letter from a determined and curious traveller rather than a devotional treatise.

What followed

Jerome settled at Bethlehem in 386 and translated the Bible there. Monastic settlements grew around the Palestinian sites. By the early Middle Ages three destinations dominated Latin Christendom: Jerusalem, Rome and Santiago de Compostela, whose pilgrims were distinguished in medieval usage as palmieri, romei and peregrini. Local shrines multiplied everywhere alongside them, because most people could never afford the long roads.

The full history of the practice, including the medieval road network, the Jubilee tradition and what the Church attaches to a pilgrimage, belongs to the guide to pilgrimage itself. What matters for a survey of the places is that the geography of Christian holy sites is layered. A fourth-century layer of Gospel sites, a patristic and medieval layer of tombs and relics, and a modern layer of apparition sanctuaries all sit on the same map.

4. Shrine, Basilica, Sanctuary: The Vocabulary

The words used for holy places are frequently confused, including in published guidebooks. They describe different things, and knowing which is which saves a great deal of misreading.

Shrine

A church or sacred place approved by the competent authority as a destination of pilgrimage, in the canonical sense set out above. In English the word is also used loosely for the container holding a saint's relics, and for a small devotional structure at a roadside. Context usually settles which is meant.

Sanctuary

In Romance languages, santuario, sanctuaire and santuário are the normal words for what English calls a shrine, which is why so many continental sites are called sanctuaries in translation. In English liturgical usage, sanctuary also means the area of a church around the altar. Both usages are correct and they are not related in meaning.

Basilica

A title of honour granted to a church building by the Holy See, carrying certain liturgical privileges and the right to display the papal insignia. There are four major basilicas, all in Rome: Saint Peter's, Saint John Lateran, Saint Mary Major and Saint Paul Outside the Walls. Every other basilica in the world is a minor basilica, and there are many hundreds of them. The word originally described a Roman public hall of a particular floor plan, which is why an old building can be architecturally a basilica without holding the title, and a modern circular church can hold the title without the floor plan.

Cathedral

The church that holds the cathedra, the bishop's chair, and therefore the principal church of a diocese. This says nothing about size or pilgrimage traffic. Many cathedrals are small. Many large and heavily visited churches are not cathedrals, and Saint John Lateran rather than Saint Peter's is the cathedral of Rome.

Abbey, monastery, lavra, skete

Monastic terms that frequently attach to pilgrimage sites, especially in the Christian East. A lavra is a monastery of a particular ancient form, with cells arranged around a common church, and the title survives at major Orthodox houses. A skete is a smaller dependent settlement. Eastern pilgrimage runs heavily through monasteries, and Western pilgrimage historically did too.

5. Relics and What They Actually Are

Relics are the physical remains of a saint, or objects closely associated with a saint or with Christ, kept and venerated by the Church. They are the reason a large number of pilgrimage sites exist at all, and they are the practice that non-Catholic Christians find hardest to accept, so the reasoning behind them is worth stating rather than assuming.

The scriptural roots

Two passages carry most of the weight. In 2 Kings 13:20 to 21, a dead man is thrown into the grave of Elisha, touches the prophet's bones and revives. In Acts 19:11 to 12, handkerchiefs and aprons that had touched Paul are carried to the sick and they recover. Acts 5:15 records people laying the sick in the street hoping Peter's shadow would fall on them. None of these makes relics necessary, and together they establish that the Scriptures do not treat contact with the holy through material things as superstition.

The three classes

• First class. The body of a saint, or any part of it.
• Second class. Something the saint owned or habitually used, such as clothing, a book or an instrument of martyrdom.
• Third class. An object deliberately touched to a first-class relic. These are the small cloth badges commonly distributed at shrines, and they can be multiplied without limit.

This classification is a convention of practice rather than a definition in the Code of Canon Law, which speaks instead of significant relics and of the reverence due to them. Church law forbids selling relics and forbids their alienation or permanent transfer without permission from the Holy See in the case of significant relics. That prohibition exists because the medieval relic trade was real, and abundantly documented.

Relics and the altar

The custom of celebrating the Eucharist over the tomb of a martyr became a rule, and the rule survives. The rite for the dedication of a church still provides for the placing of relics of a martyr or other saint beneath the altar, and asks that the relics be of a size sufficient to be recognisable as parts of a human body. Revelation 6:9, where the souls of the slain are seen beneath the heavenly altar, is the image the practice is drawn from.

What veneration means and does not mean

Catholic teaching distinguishes the worship due to God alone from the honour given to the saints and their remains. A relic is not a charm and possesses no power of its own. The Council of Trent, in its decree on the invocation and veneration of saints and on sacred images, condemned abuses in the traffic of relics in the same breath in which it defended their veneration. Anyone selling healing on the strength of a relic is doing something the Church itself has condemned for centuries.

Some relics are contested, and honesty about that is part of taking the practice seriously. The Shroud of Turin has its own guide on this site, which sets out what has actually been tested, what the results were, and what the Church has and has not said. The Church has never defined the authenticity of any relic as an article of faith, and it never will.

6. Apparition Sites and How the Church Judges Them

A large share of the shrines a modern reader has heard of are apparition sites, and almost everything commonly said about their status is imprecise. The vocabulary changed in 2024, and the change matters enough that using the old language now produces false statements.

The 2024 norms

On 17 May 2024 the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith published the Norms for Proceeding in the Discernment of Alleged Supernatural Phenomena. Under them the Church ordinarily does not declare that an apparition is supernatural. The diocesan bishop investigates, and the conclusion reached with the Dicastery's approval is one of six:

• Nihil obstat. Nothing stands in the way. Public devotion is permitted, and no declaration of supernatural origin is made.
• Prae oculis habeatur. Some positive signs are present alongside concerns that require watchfulness and clarification.
• Curatur. Significant problems exist, and devotion is already widespread, so it is not prohibited and is to be discouraged.
• Sub mandato. The phenomenon itself is not the problem, and a person or group is misusing it, so governance of the site is entrusted to a delegate.
• Prohibetur et obstruitur. Negative elements predominate and public devotion is prohibited.
• Declaratio de non supernaturalitate. A declaration that the phenomenon is not supernatural.

The Pope retains the ability to authorise a declaration of supernatural origin in an exceptional case, and the norms present that as rare. The everyday effect is that the favourable outcome for a new site is a permission, and a permission is not a verdict on the visions.

Medjugorje, stated exactly

On 19 September 2024 the Dicastery issued the note The Queen of Peace, granting a nihil obstat to the spiritual experience associated with Medjugorje. That permits public devotion and pilgrimage. It makes no declaration that the alleged apparitions are supernatural. Describing Medjugorje as approved misstates the act. Describing it as rejected, or as still under study, misstates it in the other direction. The accurate sentence is that it has a nihil obstat, which permits devotion and leaves the origin of the phenomena open.

Older sites were judged under an older framework

Lourdes, Fatima, Guadalupe, Knock, Beauraing, Banneux, La Salette, Pontmain, Laus, Champion in Wisconsin, Kibeho and Akita were all judged long before 2024, and the acts behind them are not uniform. Some rest on a named decree of a diocesan bishop after a commission of inquiry. Some rest on centuries of settled devotion together with papal liturgical acts, with no decree adjudicating any apparition at all, which is the situation at Guadalupe. The 2024 norms do not reopen or annul those earlier judgments, and they do not retroactively convert them into nihil obstats.

Site-by-site detail for every case named above, including which act stands behind each and where the sources contradict each other, is in the guide to approved Marian apparition sites. What no Catholic is ever obliged to do is believe any of them: the Catechism of the Catholic Church 67 teaches that private revelations do not belong to the deposit of faith, and that their role is to help the faithful live more fully by the definitive Revelation given in Christ.

Sources: Norms for Proceeding in the Discernment of Alleged Supernatural Phenomena, Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, published 17 May 2024; and the note The Queen of Peace, same dicastery, 19 September 2024. Both are published on vatican.va. The six conclusions above are the document's own headings in translation, with summarised descriptions.

7. The Holy Land in Outline

The land where the Gospel events took place holds the oldest layer of Christian holy places, and it is the one region where several Christian communions maintain a continuous presence at the same buildings. A short orientation is more useful here than a catalogue.

Jerusalem

Within the walled Old City sit the site of the crucifixion and burial, the traditional route of the Way of the Cross, the Cenacle on Mount Sion associated with the Last Supper and Pentecost, and the Church of Saint Anne near the Pools of Bethesda. On the Mount of Olives are Gethsemane with its ancient olive trees, the church of Dominus Flevit, and the site associated with the Ascension. The Kidron Valley separates the two. The whole set is walkable in a day and takes a lifetime to absorb.

The building over the tomb is the great meeting point of Christian traditions and the great source of their friction. Six communities hold rights within it under an arrangement dating from Ottoman decrees, and the interior is divided in a way that surprises first-time visitors. That building has its own guide covering the archaeology, the history of the structures and the arrangements between the communities: see the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

Bethlehem and Nazareth

The Church of the Nativity at Bethlehem stands over a cave venerated as the birthplace of Christ since at least the second century, when Justin Martyr and later Origen both refer to it. The present structure preserves substantial fabric from the sixth-century rebuilding under Justinian, so the building has stood in liturgical use since late antiquity. Beside it is the cave complex where Jerome lived and worked on the Latin Scriptures.

Nazareth holds the Basilica of the Annunciation, built over a first-century dwelling identified by local tradition as the house of Mary, with a Byzantine and then a Crusader church above it before the modern building. The excavations beneath it are part of the visit.

Galilee

Capernaum preserves the foundations of a first-century house venerated from an early date as Peter's, with an octagonal Byzantine church built over it, and the remains of a synagogue standing above an earlier one. Along the lakeshore are Tabgha, associated with the multiplication of the loaves and fishes, and the Mount of the Beatitudes above it. The lake itself is small enough to see across, which changes how the Gospel narratives read.

The Jordan, the desert and Sinai

The traditional baptism site on the Jordan is marked on both banks. The Judean desert holds Byzantine monastic foundations still inhabited, including Mar Saba and Saint George of Koziba. Further south, in Egypt, the Monastery of Saint Catherine at the foot of Mount Sinai has been occupied since the sixth century, holds a manuscript library assembled across that span, and is Greek Orthodox. Its feast of Saint Catherine of Alexandria falls on 25 November.

8. Rome and Western Europe in Outline

Western Europe carries a dense concentration of Christian shrines, built up over sixteen centuries in three layers: apostolic and martyr tombs, medieval relic churches, and modern apparition sanctuaries.

Rome

Rome's claim rests on the tombs of Peter and Paul and on the graves of the martyrs in the catacombs along the consular roads. The four major basilicas anchor the traditional pilgrim circuit, joined by three further churches in the older seven-church walk associated with Philip Neri in the sixteenth century. The catacombs of Callixtus, Domitilla, Priscilla and Sebastian are open to visitors and are burial grounds rather than hiding places, which is the most common misconception about them. The feast of the Dedication of the Basilicas of Peter and Paul falls on 18 November, that of Saint John Lateran on 9 November, and that of Saint Mary Major on 5 August. The basilica over the Vatican necropolis has its own guide: see Saint Peter's Basilica.

Italy beyond Rome

Assisi holds the tomb of Francis in the basilica begun in 1228, two years after his death, and the Portiuncula chapel he rebuilt with his own hands, now enclosed within a much larger church. Padua holds the tomb of Anthony, whose feast is 13 June. Loreto holds the Holy House, a small stone structure venerated as the house of Nazareth, with a feast on 10 December. Monte Cassino, founded by Benedict around 529, destroyed in 1944 and rebuilt to the earlier plan, holds his tomb. Turin holds the linen cloth treated on this site in its own guide to the Shroud.

Spain, Portugal and France

Santiago de Compostela grew around a tomb identified in the early ninth century as that of the Apostle James, and the roads to it carried a developed pilgrimage infrastructure, complete with a twelfth-century guidebook. The feast of Saint James falls on 25 July, and a Compostelan Holy Year is kept when that date falls on a Sunday. The routes have their own guide: see the Camino de Santiago routes.

France holds Chartres with its Marian relic and its pilgrim labyrinth, Mont-Saint-Michel, Vézelay, Le Puy-en-Velay, Tours with the tomb of Martin, Lisieux with that of Thérèse, Ars, Rocamadour, Paray-le-Monial, Rue du Bac in Paris and La Salette in the Alps. The Pyrenean sanctuary that grew after 1858 is covered in the Lourdes guide, and the Portuguese sanctuary in the Cova da Iria in the Fatima guide.

Britain, Ireland and the north

England's shrine network was dismantled in 1538, when the great pilgrimage shrines, including that of Thomas Becket at Canterbury, were destroyed by order of the Crown and their treasuries confiscated. Becket had been murdered in his own cathedral on 29 December 1170 and canonised within three years, and Canterbury had drawn pilgrims from across northern Europe for three centuries. Walsingham in Norfolk, whose shrine tradition dates its founding vision to 1061, was suppressed in the same campaign and was revived in the twentieth century, with Anglican and Catholic shrines now standing separately in the same village.

Ireland holds Knock in County Mayo, where an apparition was reported in 1879 and whose feast falls on 17 August, along with the older penitential sites of Croagh Patrick and Lough Derg, both of which involve physical hardship as part of the observance. Northern Europe holds Trondheim in Norway, whose medieval pilgrim way to the shrine of Olav has been re-established as a walking route, and Vadstena in Sweden, associated with Bridget.

9. Eastern Europe and the Christian East

East of the old Latin heartland the pattern of holy places changes. Monasteries matter more than parish shrines, icons matter as much as relics, and several of the major destinations are Orthodox rather than Catholic.

Catholic Central Europe

Jasna Góra in Częstochowa, Poland, holds the icon known as the Black Madonna, entrusted to the Pauline monks who were established there in 1382. The monastery withstood a Swedish siege in 1655, an event that fixed the shrine at the centre of Polish national identity. The feast of Our Lady of Częstochowa is 26 August. Mariazell in Austria, whose foundation tradition dates to 1157, drew pilgrims from across the Habsburg lands, and its pilgrim roads are again walked. Einsiedeln in Switzerland, Altötting in Bavaria, Levoča in Slovakia and Šiluva in Lithuania belong to the same family of Marian monastic shrines.

Orthodox monastic destinations

Mount Athos in northern Greece is a self-governing monastic territory of twenty ruling monasteries with their dependent sketes and cells, under the spiritual jurisdiction of the Ecumenical Patriarchate. Its ancient rule of avaton excludes women from the peninsula, and access for male visitors is controlled by the monastic authorities. Meteora in Thessaly holds monasteries built on sandstone pillars from the fourteenth century onward, several still in monastic use. Patmos holds the monastery of Saint John the Theologian and the cave associated with the writing of Revelation.

The Slavic lands hold the Kyiv Pechersk Lavra, the Monastery of the Caves founded in 1051 and the mother house of Rus monasticism, and the Trinity Lavra of Saint Sergius at Sergiyev Posad. Romania's painted monasteries in Bucovina, with their exterior frescoes, and the Serbian monasteries of Kosovo and Metohija are pilgrimage destinations in the same tradition.

The Oriental Orthodox heartlands

The Oriental Orthodox communion, which includes the Coptic, Armenian Apostolic, Ethiopian Tewahedo, Eritrean, Syriac and Malankara Churches, separated from the rest of Christendom over the definition of the Council of Chalcedon in 451 and holds its own ancient network of holy places. Etchmiadzin in Armenia is the mother see of the Armenian Apostolic Church, on a site whose foundation tradition places it at the beginning of the fourth century. Egypt holds the monasteries of Wadi Natrun, some in continuous occupation since the fourth century, and the sites along the traditional route of the Holy Family's flight into Egypt, including Deir al-Muharraq. The Ethiopian rock-hewn churches of Lalibela, carved from living stone in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, remain in liturgical use and draw very large crowds at Genna, the Ethiopian Christmas, kept on 7 January.

Catholics reading about these places should know that the Eastern Catholic Churches, in communion with Rome while keeping Eastern liturgical and canonical traditions, overlap this geography closely and have their own shrines. Their situation is set out in the guide to the Eastern Catholic Churches.

10. The Americas in Outline

The Americas hold no apostolic tombs and no fourth-century basilicas. Their holy places are almost entirely of the second kind that produces shrines in a young church: apparitions, images and the graves of recent saints.

Mexico

The basilica at Tepeyac in Mexico City houses the tilma bearing the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe, associated with the account of apparitions to the Indigenous convert Juan Diego Cuauhtlatoatzin in December 1531 preserved in the Nahuatl Nican Mopohua. No episcopal decree adjudicating those apparitions exists. What exists is four centuries of Church acts built on the devotion, including a proper Mass and Office granted by Benedict XIV in 1754, the solemn crowning of the image in 1895, and the canonisation of Juan Diego by John Paul II at the basilica on 31 July 2002. The feast falls on 12 December. The devotion and its history are treated in the guide to Our Lady of Guadalupe.

North America

The Shrine of Our Lady of Good Help at Champion, Wisconsin, is the only site of a Marian apparition in the United States to have received a favourable determination from a diocesan bishop, given by Bishop David Ricken on 8 December 2010 for the events reported to Adele Brise in 1859. Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupré in Quebec, where pilgrimage has been recorded since 1658, keeps the feast of Saint Anne on 26 July. The Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington and the Martyrs' Shrine at Midland, Ontario, associated with the North American Martyrs, both draw national pilgrimage. El Santuario de Chimayó in New Mexico is walked to by large numbers during Holy Week, a devotion with deep roots in the region's Hispano and Pueblo communities.

South America

Aparecida in Brazil grew around a small terracotta image of the Immaculate Conception recovered from the Paraíba do Sul river by fishermen in 1717. Our Lady of Aparecida is patroness of Brazil and her feast, 12 October, is a national holiday there. Luján in Argentina, Copacabana in Bolivia, Quinche in Ecuador and Chiquinquirá in Colombia are the corresponding national Marian shrines of their countries, and the Lord of Miracles procession moves through Lima across several days each October.

Devotion in Latin America runs through images and processions more than through relics, and the confraternities that carry the images are often centuries old. Understanding these shrines means understanding popular piety on its own terms, which the Church has repeatedly asked pastors to respect rather than to correct from a distance.

11. Africa, Asia and Oceania in Outline

Africa, Asia and Oceania hold Christian communities that reach back to antiquity alongside shrines founded within living memory.

Africa

Ethiopia's Christianity dates to the fourth century, and Axum's Church of Our Lady Mary of Zion is its central sanctuary, with the annual Timkat celebration of the Baptism of Christ among the great public liturgies of the Christian world. Uganda holds the shrine at Namugongo, where Charles Lwanga and his companions were put to death in 1885 and 1886 for refusing the demands of the kabaka, canonised in 1964, with a national pilgrimage each 3 June. Rwanda holds Kibeho, where apparitions reported by schoolgirls from 28 November 1981 were the subject of a favourable judgment by Bishop Augustin Misago in 2001 concerning three of the visionaries. Algeria holds Notre-Dame d'Afrique above Algiers, and Tunisia and Egypt hold the sites of the North African Church of Cyprian and Augustine.

Asia

India holds San Thome Basilica at Mylapore in Chennai, built over a tomb venerated as that of the Apostle Thomas, whose feast falls on 3 July, and the Basilica of Our Lady of Good Health at Velankanni in Tamil Nadu, which draws Christians, Hindus and Muslims alike. Japan holds Nagasaki, where twenty-six Christians were crucified on 5 February 1597, and the church at Ōura where in 1865 a French missionary was approached by descendants of Christians who had kept the faith without clergy for over two centuries. Akita, also in Japan, is the site of events reported in 1973 on which Bishop John Shojiro Ito issued a pastoral letter in 1984 permitting veneration; the status of that case is set out in the apparition sites guide. The Philippines holds the Black Nazarene in Quiapo, Manila, and Antipolo, both centres of very large annual processions, and Vietnam holds La Vang.

Oceania

Australia holds the tomb of Mary MacKillop at North Sydney, canonised in 2010 as the country's first saint. The Pacific holds Kalaupapa on Molokai in Hawaii, where Damien de Veuster served the leprosy settlement until his death in 1889 and where Marianne Cope continued the work, both later canonised. These are shrines of recent Christian memory rather than of ancient tradition, and they show the pattern by which shrines are made, which has not changed since the second century: people go where a holy life ended.

12. How the Traditions Differ on Holy Places

Christians disagree about holy places, and the disagreement is theological. Each tradition deserves to be stated in its own terms before anyone responds to it.

Catholic

The Catholic Church treats pilgrimage as a form of popular piety, listed among such forms in the Catechism of the Catholic Church 1674, alongside the veneration of relics and visits to sanctuaries. It regulates shrines canonically, requires the approval of the local ordinary, forbids the sale of relics, and attaches indulgences to certain visits under specified conditions. It obliges no one to make a pilgrimage and obliges no one to believe any private revelation.

Eastern Orthodox

Orthodox Christianity venerates relics and icons with the same theological reasoning drawn from the Incarnation, defined at the Seventh Ecumenical Council in 787 against the iconoclasts. Orthodox practice tends to keep the bodies of saints whole and accessible for veneration rather than dividing them widely, and pilgrimage runs heavily to monasteries and to wonderworking icons. The Orthodox do not use the Latin theology of indulgences, so an Orthodox pilgrimage carries no equivalent of the Catholic indulgence framework. Orthodox belief in general is set out in the guide to the Eastern Orthodox Church.

Oriental Orthodox

The Coptic, Armenian, Ethiopian, Eritrean, Syriac and Malankara Churches keep pilgrimage traditions as old as any in Christianity, centred on desert monasteries, martyr sites and the relics of their own saints. The Coptic Orthodox Patriarchate of Alexandria issued a favourable statement in 1968 regarding reported appearances of the Virgin at Zeitoun in Cairo; the Catholic Church has issued no judgment on that case, and the two Churches judge such matters through their own authorities. The Ethiopian tradition is distinctive in the scale of its public festal pilgrimage.

Protestant

The sixteenth-century Reformers rejected the veneration of relics and the merit attached to shrine visits. Calvin's Treatise on Relics of 1543 catalogued duplicated and implausible relics as an argument against the whole practice, and Luther attacked the sale of indulgences connected with relic collections. English shrines were destroyed under royal authority in 1538. The theological objection is that veneration diverts to creatures what belongs to God, and that Scripture nowhere commands pilgrimage under the New Covenant.

Protestant practice today varies widely. Many evangelical Christians travel to biblical sites in large numbers, framed as study and teaching tours rather than as acts of veneration, and would object to the word pilgrimage while doing something that resembles it. Anglican practice ranges from the Catholic end, which maintains its own shrine at Walsingham, to the Reformed end, which does not. Lutherans in Germany and Scandinavia have revived medieval walking routes as spiritual journeys without restoring relic veneration. The Reformation's arguments and the Catholic responses are set out in the guide to the Reformation.

The table summarises mainstream positions and binds no particular body. Orthodox governance is by autocephalous Church, Oriental Orthodox by patriarchate, and Protestant practice varies by denomination and by congregation. Ask locally rather than assuming from a summary.

13. When You Cannot Travel

Most Christians in history never saw any of the places described above. Cost, distance, illness, caring responsibilities, immigration status and simple obligation kept them home, and the Church has always known this. The response was never to tell them they were missing something essential, because they were not.

Two traditions grew up instead. The first is the local substitute. The Stations of the Cross exist because Franciscans in Europe wanted people who could not reach Jerusalem to walk the Way of the Cross in their own parish, and the devotion spread across the Catholic world in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Sacred mountains in northern Italy, with chapels representing scenes of the Passion along a hillside path, were built for the same reason. The rosary itself functions as a portable itinerary through the mysteries.

The second is spiritual pilgrimage properly so called, the deliberate uniting of oneself in prayer with a journey one is not making. This has a long devotional history and it is not a modern consolation prize. A related tradition allows for the possibility that an indulgence granted for a pilgrimage may be extended by the competent authority to those prevented from travelling, under the conditions specified in the particular grant. Anyone relying on that should check the terms of the actual grant rather than a summary of it, because the conditions are specific to each one.

Practical approaches for people who are homebound, ill or simply unable to go are set out in the guide to virtual pilgrimage, which covers what is genuinely available and is honest about what a screen cannot do.

14. Where to Begin: A Routed Index

The guides below cover individual destinations and questions in depth. Start with the one that matches what you are actually trying to decide.

Where a destination is named on this page without a link, look for it in the places index, which lists every guide published in this section. Some of the destinations named above have no guide yet.

15. Related Guides