Catholic Pilgrimage Sites in the United States and Canada

1. What a North American Pilgrimage Is

A Catholic pilgrimage in the United States or Canada is a journey undertaken for prayer to a place the Church has set apart, and the continent has more of those places than most Catholics who live here realise. Washington holds the national votive shrine of the United States. Wisconsin holds the only approved Marian apparition site on American soil. New Mexico holds an adobe chapel that Hispano families have walked to on Good Friday for two centuries. Quebec holds a basilica where pilgrims have been leaving crutches at the door since the seventeenth century.

Nothing about the definition of pilgrimage requires an ocean crossing. The general definition is set out on our page on what a pilgrimage is and why Catholics make one: a journey with a religious purpose, undertaken in a spirit of penance and petition, to a place associated with God's action. Distance is a circumstance of the journey. A family that drives six hours to Emmitsburg with confession, Mass and a rosary on the road has made a pilgrimage in the full and ordinary sense of the word.

The practical case for staying on the continent is easy to state. Most of these places sit within a day's drive of somewhere a large number of Catholics already live, and a pilgrim can arrange the whole trip themselves. A pilgrim who lives in Ohio can be at Carey by lunchtime. A pilgrim in New England can reach Stockbridge in an afternoon. That accessibility removes almost every excuse a person has for postponing a pilgrimage until a season of life that may never arrive.

The spiritual case is stronger. The saints buried in these places lived under the same skies, in the same weather, inside the same country. Elizabeth Ann Seton buried two daughters in Maryland. Kateri Tekakwitha walked out of the Mohawk Valley in winter. Damien de Veuster died of the same disease as the people he served on a Hawaiian peninsula that the government used as a place of exile. Frances Xavier Cabrini crossed the Atlantic more than twenty times to build hospitals and orphanages for immigrants nobody else wanted. Holiness in North America is not a foreign import. The evidence for that is scattered across the map in stone and bone.

Pilgrimage is a habit Christ himself kept. The Holy Family walked to Jerusalem every year (Luke 2:41). Christians inherited the practice, extended it to the tombs of the martyrs, and carried it wherever they settled. When French Jesuits were killed in the Mohawk Valley in the 1640s and Belgian and Irish and Polish immigrants filled the Midwest two centuries later, the practice came with them and it took root in ground that no one in Rome had ever heard of.

2. The Titles the Continent Prays Under

The United States and Canada each pray under a specific patronal title, and knowing them makes sense of half the shrines on this page. The bishops of the United States chose the Immaculate Conception as the country's patronal title at the Sixth Provincial Council of Baltimore in 1846, and Pope Pius IX confirmed the choice in 1847. That decision came seven years before the doctrine itself was defined in 1854, which is why the national shrine in Washington bears the title it does.

Canada prays under Saint Joseph. New France was placed under his patronage in the seventeenth century, and the choice shaped everything from parish names to the enormous oratory that now stands on the north slope of Mount Royal. The Canadian Church also keeps Saint Anne, the mother of Mary, at the centre of its devotional life, a legacy of the Breton sailors who first built at Beaupre in 1658 and of the Indigenous nations who took up the devotion and never let it go.

Over the whole hemisphere stands Our Lady of Guadalupe, honoured as Patroness of the Americas. Her image and her title travelled north with Mexican and Mexican-American Catholics, and shrines dedicated to her now stand from Wisconsin to Texas. The apparition itself, the tilma and the basilica belong to Mexico City, and we cover them on the page about the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe pilgrimage in Mexico City and in the doctrinal treatment at Our Lady of Guadalupe. This page stays north of the Rio Grande.

3. The National Shrine in Washington

The Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception on Michigan Avenue in Washington, D.C. is the national votive shrine of the United States and the largest Catholic church in North America by the shrine's own account. Bishop Thomas Shahan, then rector of the Catholic University of America, proposed it and received the approval of Pope Saint Pius X in 1913. The foundation stone was laid in 1920, the Crypt Church opened for worship in 1924, construction stopped through the Depression and the Second World War, and the Great Upper Church was finally dedicated on 20 November 1959. Pope John Paul II raised it to the rank of minor basilica in 1990.

Source: the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception publishes its own history, including the 1913 papal approval, the 1920 foundation stone, the 1959 dedication of the Great Upper Church and the 1990 designation as a minor basilica, and it describes itself as the largest Roman Catholic church in North America. Comparative superlatives about church size vary by the measure used and by who is publishing them.

What makes the building worth a pilgrimage is the chapels. The shrine holds dozens of chapels and oratories, and many of them were paid for by particular communities of American Catholics who wanted their own patroness on the wall of the national church. Our Lady of Czestochowa is there because Polish Americans built her chapel. Our Lady of La Vang is there because Vietnamese Americans built hers. There are chapels for Slovak, Lithuanian, Filipino, Slovenian, Byzantine, African American, Irish, Italian, Chinese, Korean, Indian and Cuban devotions. Walking the ambulatory of the Great Upper Church is a walk through the immigration history of the American Church, told in mosaic, and it is the fastest way to understand that Catholicism in this country arrived in dozens of separate boats.

The Trinity Dome mosaic, the last major element of the original design, was completed and dedicated in December 2017. It shows the Trinity, the Blessed Virgin and a procession of saints with strong American representation, and it closed a construction project that had run for nearly a century.

Three popes have come here. John Paul II in 1979, Benedict XVI in 2008, and Francis in 2015, who celebrated the canonisation Mass of Junipero Serra on the east portico on 23 September 2015. That canonisation is contested by many Native Californians for reasons taken up honestly in the section on the mission trails below.

A pilgrim with one day in Washington should give the shrine the morning, go to confession, attend Mass, and then spend an hour finding the chapel that belongs to whichever people they came from. Catholics who have never thought of their faith as an inheritance tend to find that hour changes something.

4. Champion, Wisconsin

Champion, Wisconsin holds the only Marian apparition site in the United States that carries a decree of approval from the Catholic Church. Bishop David L. Ricken of the Diocese of Green Bay issued the decree on 8 December 2010, concerning three apparitions reported in October 1859 by a young Belgian immigrant named Adele Brise on a farm track in Brown County. The full account, the exact wording of the decree and what it does and does not settle are laid out on our page on the Shrine of Our Lady of Good Help at Champion, Wisconsin.

The short version for a pilgrim planning a route: the message asked for four things. Prayer for the conversion of sinners, a general confession, Holy Communion offered for that intention, and the catechism taught to the children of that country. Adele Brise spent the next thirty-seven years walking farm to farm doing the fourth. There is no prophecy in the message, no timetable, and no secret.

Champion also matters because of what surrounds it. Claims of apparitions are common in the United States, and several have been formally rejected by the bishops of the dioceses where they occurred. Since 17 May 2024 the Church has judged such claims under the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith's Norms for Proceeding in the Discernment of Alleged Supernatural Phenomena, which ordinarily do not issue any declaration that an event is supernatural. Our page on Marian apparition sites and their approval status sets out the six possible conclusions under those norms and applies them case by case. Read it before you plan a trip to any site you have seen promoted online, because a great deal of what circulates about American apparition claims is inaccurate about the Church's actual position.

5. El Santuario de Chimayo

El Santuario de Chimayo is a small adobe chapel in the Sangre de Cristo foothills north of Santa Fe, built between 1813 and 1816 by Bernardo Abeyta, and it is the destination of a Holy Week walking pilgrimage kept by the Hispano families of northern New Mexico for generations. Every Holy Week, and above all on Good Friday, walkers come up the highway shoulders from Santa Fe, Espanola and further, some covering the last stretch barefoot, some carrying crosses. State police close lanes for them. It is the closest thing this country has to the road to Santiago, and it is walked in one day.

The chapel itself is dedicated to Our Lord of Esquipulas, a devotion carried north from Guatemala, and the crucifix over the altar bears that title. Off the sanctuary is a low side room with a hole in the floor, el pocito, holding loose earth that pilgrims take away. The walls of the adjoining room are hung with crutches, photographs, letters, baby shoes and hospital bracelets left by people who came and prayed and wanted to leave something behind.

Be clear about the dirt. The Church has never declared the earth of Chimayo to be miraculous, and the shrine itself states that the soil is replenished from the surrounding land. It is a devotional practice with a long and honourable history, in the family of practices that includes water from Lourdes and oil from a saint's lamp. Sacramentals dispose a person to grace through the prayer of the Church. They are not amulets, and a Catholic who treats them as amulets has slipped into superstition, which the Catechism addresses directly in paragraphs 2110 to 2111. Take a handful of dirt if you want one. Go to confession first. The confession is the part that changes something.

Source: El Santuario de Chimayo publishes its own account of the chapel's construction between 1813 and 1816, of the devotion to Our Lord of Esquipulas, and of the replenishment of the earth in el pocito. The Santuario was designated a National Historic Landmark by the United States Department of the Interior in 1970. No estimate of Good Friday pilgrim numbers is given here because published figures vary widely and none is authoritative.

What makes Chimayo worth the trip for a pilgrim from outside New Mexico is the seriousness of the local practice. This is a devotion sustained by ordinary families with no promotion budget, in a chapel with a dirt floor, in a valley where the same surnames appear on the pews and in the cemetery. Nothing about it is staged.

6. Saint Joseph's Oratory, Montreal

Saint Joseph's Oratory of Mount Royal, which the oratory describes as the largest church in Canada, exists because a doorkeeper wanted a chapel. Alfred Bessette, in religion Brother Andre of the Congregation of Holy Cross, spent forty years as porter at the College Notre-Dame across the road from the mountain. He had almost no schooling, poor health and no office in the Church beyond opening a door. Sick people came to see him, he told them to pray to Saint Joseph and rub themselves with oil from the lamp before Joseph's statue, and a great many of them reported that they recovered. He raised money for a small wooden chapel on the slope in 1904. The basilica that now stands over it was finished in 1967.

Brother Andre was canonised as Saint Andre Bessette by Pope Benedict XVI on 17 October 2010. His tomb is in the church, and his heart is preserved in a reliquary in the oratory museum. The votive chapel below the basilica is walled with crutches and canes left by people who arrived on them and left without them, and it holds banks of candles that burn continuously.

Outside, a wooden central staircase of ninety-nine steps runs up the slope to the oratory doors, and pilgrims climb it on their knees, one step per prayer, usually praying the Our Father or the Rosary as they go. Nobody is obliged to do it. Many people do it anyway, and the sight of a man in a business suit halfway up on his knees on a Tuesday morning is a fair summary of what Montreal Catholicism still is.

Source: Saint Joseph's Oratory of Mount Royal publishes its own history, including Brother Andre's first chapel of 1904, the completion of the basilica in 1967 and the ninety-nine steps of the central wooden staircase, and it describes itself as the largest church in Canada. Comparative superlatives about church size vary by the measure used and by who is publishing them.

A pilgrim doing eastern Canada should pair the Oratory with Notre-Dame-de-Bon-Secours Chapel in Old Montreal, covered in the section on Canada's other pilgrim roads below. The two are half an hour apart and together they cover three and a half centuries of the city's faith.

7. Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupre, Quebec

The Basilica of Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupre stands on the north shore of the St Lawrence about thirty kilometres east of Quebec City, and pilgrims have been coming to the site since 1658. The first chapel was raised by settlers and Breton sailors who kept the devotion to Saint Anne, the mother of the Blessed Virgin, that was strong on the Breton coast. Sailors who survived storms on the river credited her, and the practice of leaving crutches at the shrine began early and never stopped. The columns inside the entrance are covered with them.

The present basilica was begun in 1923 after fire destroyed its predecessor in 1922, and the building was consecrated in 1976. It holds a relic of Saint Anne given by Rome, the statue the shrine calls the miraculous statue of Saint Anne, and a series of mosaics and stained glass telling her story and the story of the colony that grew up around the shrine.

Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupre has been a major Indigenous pilgrimage destination for centuries. Mi'kmaq, Innu, Huron-Wendat, Abenaki and other nations of the northeast have made the journey for generations, and the annual novena leading to the feast of Saint Anne on 26 July draws pilgrims from across eastern Canada and the northern United States. Pope Francis celebrated Mass at the basilica on 28 July 2022 during the visit he himself described as a penitential pilgrimage, made to apologise for the role of Catholic institutions in Canada's residential school system. Any Catholic making this pilgrimage should know that history before arriving. The shrine is a place of great devotion for Indigenous Catholics and it stands inside a wound the Church has acknowledged as its own.

Source: the Sanctuary of Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupre publishes its own history, including the 1658 foundation, the 1922 fire, the 1923 rebuilding and the 1976 consecration. Pope Francis's visit to Canada from 24 to 29 July 2022, including the Mass at Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupre on 28 July and the pilgrimage to Lac Ste. Anne on 26 July, is documented in the published itinerary and addresses of the Holy See.

8. Auriesville and Fonda, New York

Two shrines eight miles apart in the Mohawk Valley of upstate New York mark the beginning of the Church in what is now the northeastern United States, and they mark it in blood. The Shrine of Our Lady of Martyrs at Auriesville stands on a ridge above the Mohawk River associated with Ossernenon, the village where the Jesuit missionary Isaac Jogues and the lay assistant Rene Goupil were tortured and killed in the 1640s. Goupil died in 1642, Jogues and his companion Jean de Lalande in 1646. They are three of the eight North American Martyrs canonised by Pope Pius XI in 1930, five of whom died in what is now Ontario and three in what is now New York.

The ridge holds a large circular church built in the 1930s, ravine paths, and an outdoor Way of the Cross. It is quiet, wooded and unfashionable, and it is one of the few places in the United States where a Catholic can stand where a canonised martyr died.

Eight miles west at Fonda is the shrine of Saint Kateri Tekakwitha, on the excavated site of the Mohawk village of Caughnawaga where she was baptised in 1676. Kateri was born at Ossernenon in 1656 to a Mohawk father and an Algonquin Christian mother, was orphaned and scarred by the smallpox epidemic that killed her family, was baptised at the age of twenty, and fled to the Christian Mohawk settlement at Kahnawake near Montreal, where she died in 1680 at the age of twenty-four. Pope Benedict XVI canonised her on 21 October 2012, the first canonised saint born among the Indigenous peoples of what is now the United States and Canada. Her tomb is at the Saint Francis Xavier Mission at Kahnawake in Quebec, which makes the pair of New York shrines and the Quebec tomb a natural three-point route. Her life, her family, the epidemic, the flight north and the arguments about how her story has been told are covered on our page on Saint Kateri Tekakwitha.

Representing this history honestly means holding two things at once. The Jesuits who died at Ossernenon were killed by Mohawk warriors in the context of the Iroquois wars, French alliances with Mohawk enemies, and epidemics that arrived with Europeans and devastated Haudenosaunee communities. Kateri was a Mohawk woman, and Mohawk Catholics today are the living community of both stories. A pilgrim who visits Auriesville and Fonda and treats the second only as an appendix to the first has misread the ground.

9. Emmitsburg, Maryland

Emmitsburg is a small town in the Catoctin Mountains of northern Maryland that holds two distinct pilgrimage destinations within a couple of miles of each other. The first is the National Shrine Grotto of Our Lady of Lourdes on the slope above Mount St Mary's University, a wooded hillside with a replica grotto, a chapel, a mountain path lined with statuary and a gilded statue of Mary on a tower visible from the valley. The hillside was used for prayer from the earliest years of the college in the first decade of the nineteenth century, and the shrine dates its dedication as a replica of the grotto at Lourdes to 1875, seventeen years after the apparitions in France. If you cannot get to France, this is the closest most Americans will come, and our page on the Lourdes pilgrimage in France explains what the original is and what happened there in 1858.

The second is the Basilica of the National Shrine of Saint Elizabeth Ann Seton, in the town below. Elizabeth Ann Seton was a New York Episcopalian widow with five children who entered the Catholic Church in 1805, came to Emmitsburg in 1809, founded the Sisters of Charity of St Joseph's and opened a free school for local girls. She died in 1821 and was canonised by Pope Paul VI on 14 September 1975, the first person born in what is now the United States to be canonised. Her remains are enshrined in the basilica, and the Stone House and the White House, where she lived, taught and died, still stand on the grounds.

We do not retell her life here. The full biography, including her conversion, the loss of her husband in Italy, the founding of the sisters and the deaths of two of her daughters at Emmitsburg, is on our page on Saint Elizabeth Ann Seton. Read it before you go. The buildings mean considerably more when you know who was inside them.

Source: the National Shrine Grotto of Our Lady of Lourdes at Mount St Mary's University publishes its own history, including the use of the hillside for prayer from the college's earliest years and the 1875 dedication of the grotto as a replica of Lourdes. The Basilica of the National Shrine of Saint Elizabeth Ann Seton publishes the dates of her reception into the Church, her arrival at Emmitsburg and her canonisation.

A pilgrim in the mid-Atlantic can build a single strong weekend out of Washington, Emmitsburg and Philadelphia. The national shrine on the first day, the Grotto and the Seton basilica on the second, and the tombs of Saint John Neumann and Saint Katharine Drexel in Philadelphia on the third. That is four canonised saints and the national shrine of a country, inside a two-hour driving radius.

10. Marian Shrines of the Midwest

The American Midwest holds a dense cluster of Marian shrines built by nineteenth and twentieth century immigrant communities, and four of them anchor pilgrimages that people still make in numbers.

Holy Hill, Hubertus, Wisconsin

The Basilica of the National Shrine of Mary Help of Christians sits on a wooded hill in Washington County, northwest of Milwaukee, and it is visible for miles across the Kettle Moraine. Discalced Carmelite friars have served it since the late nineteenth century, and Pope Benedict XVI raised the church to the rank of minor basilica in 2006. The lower chapel holds a wall of crutches and braces left by pilgrims. A tower staircase climbs to an observation deck over the whole county, and an outdoor Stations of the Cross runs through the woods below the church. Holy Hill is one of the easiest strong pilgrimages in the country to reach, a short drive from Milwaukee and a morning's drive from Chicago's northern suburbs, and it pairs naturally with Champion further north.

Our Lady of the Snows, Belleville, Illinois

The National Shrine of Our Lady of the Snows was founded by the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate in 1958 on farmland across the Mississippi from St Louis, and it is an outdoor shrine rather than a single church. The grounds carry a large outdoor amphitheatre, a Lourdes grotto, an Annunciation garden, a Way of the Cross, a Resurrection garden and a church, laid out so that a pilgrim walks between them. The devotion to Our Lady of the Snows goes back to the Roman basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore and the August legend of snow marking out its foundations. Belleville is the American expression of it.

Our Lady of Consolation, Carey, Ohio

The National Shrine of Our Lady of Consolation in the small town of Carey, in northwest Ohio, is served by Conventual Franciscans and centres on a statue of Our Lady of Consolation brought from Luxembourg in 1875. The great pilgrimage day is the Assumption, 15 August, when the statue is carried in procession through the streets of the town. Carey is a working farm town of a few thousand people and the shrine sits in the middle of it, which gives the whole thing a plainness that larger shrines lose.

American Czestochowa, Doylestown, Pennsylvania

Doylestown sits in Pennsylvania and belongs to the same family of immigrant shrines. The National Shrine of Our Lady of Czestochowa at Doylestown in Bucks County, Pennsylvania was built by the Pauline Fathers, the same order that has guarded the original icon in Poland since 1382, and it was dedicated in 1966 to mark the millennium of Polish Christianity. It is a principal centre of Polish American Catholic devotion and a cemetery of Polish American veterans surrounds it. The original, the icon, the siege of 1655 and the meaning of the scarred face are covered on our page on Jasna Gora and the Black Madonna of Czestochowa.

Our Lady of Guadalupe, La Crosse, Wisconsin

The Shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe at La Crosse, on a bluff above the Mississippi, was built at the initiative of Cardinal Raymond Burke while he was bishop there and was dedicated on 31 July 2008. It is a daughter shrine of Tepeyac, with a large church, a votive chapel, a pilgrim centre, a rosary walk and outdoor Stations. Its existence in western Wisconsin is a marker of how far the devotion to Guadalupe has travelled north.

11. Divine Mercy at Stockbridge

The National Shrine of The Divine Mercy sits on Eden Hill above the town of Stockbridge in the Berkshire hills of western Massachusetts, and it is the American centre of the devotion recorded by Saint Faustina Kowalska. The Marian Fathers of the Immaculate Conception, a Polish congregation, established themselves there in the 1940s and became the principal publishers and promoters of the Divine Mercy message in English. The shrine church, the outdoor Stations on the hillside and the grounds looking east over the Berkshires make it one of the more beautiful places on this list.

The devotion itself rests on the diary of Faustina Kowalska, a Polish sister who died in 1938 and was canonised by Pope John Paul II on 30 April 2000. On the same day the Pope established the Second Sunday of Easter as Divine Mercy Sunday for the universal Church. The devotion has three ordinary elements: the image of the merciful Christ with the words Jesus, I trust in You, the Chaplet of Divine Mercy prayed on rosary beads, and the Hour of Great Mercy at three in the afternoon. Her life and the content of the diary are covered on our page on Saint Faustina Kowalska.

Divine Mercy Sunday is the great day at Stockbridge, and it fills the hill. A pilgrim who wants a quieter visit should come on an ordinary weekday, go to confession, pray the Chaplet at three, and walk the outdoor Stations. That is the entire devotion, done properly, in an afternoon.

12. Hanceville, Alabama

The Shrine of the Most Blessed Sacrament at Hanceville in rural Cullman County, Alabama is a Romanesque church and monastery raised in the late 1990s by Mother Angelica and the Poor Clare Nuns of Perpetual Adoration, and it exists for one purpose: the exposition and adoration of the Blessed Sacrament. The church was dedicated in 1999. The Eucharist is exposed in a monstrance at the centre of the sanctuary, the nuns keep the hours behind the grille, and pilgrims come to kneel.

Mother Angelica, born Rita Rizzo in Canton, Ohio, founded EWTN in a garage at her monastery in Irondale, Alabama in 1981, and built it into a global Catholic broadcaster. She moved her community to Hanceville and built the shrine there. She died on Easter Sunday, 27 March 2016, and is buried at the shrine.

The site is deliberately remote. There is no city nearby, the approach runs through farmland, and the effect is closer to a European monastery than to an American parish complex. Pilgrims typically pair it with a visit to the EWTN campus at Irondale near Birmingham, an hour south.

Eucharistic adoration is the whole content of the visit, so it is worth knowing what the Church actually teaches about the Sacrament being adored. The Catholic position is that the whole Christ, body, blood, soul and divinity, is truly, really and substantially present under the appearances of bread and wine, a doctrine set out at the Council of Trent and restated in the Catechism at paragraphs 1374 to 1377. Our page on the Eucharist and the Real Presence gives the Scriptural basis in John 6 and 1 Corinthians 11, and states the Orthodox, Lutheran, Reformed and Baptist positions in their own terms before responding to them. Read it on the way. Adoration is more coherent when a person knows what they believe they are looking at.

13. Shrines of the American Saints

Four American shrines hold the bodies of canonised or beatified people who lived and worked in the United States within the last two centuries, and together they make a pilgrimage of their own.

Saint Frances Xavier Cabrini

Frances Xavier Cabrini, an Italian sister who founded the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, crossed the Atlantic repeatedly to build schools, orphanages and hospitals for Italian immigrants in American cities, took United States citizenship, and died in Chicago in 1917. Pope Pius XII canonised her in 1946, the first United States citizen to be canonised. Her remains are enshrined beneath the altar at the Saint Frances Xavier Cabrini Shrine in Washington Heights, upper Manhattan. A second shrine stands in Chicago at the site of the hospital she founded, and a third, the Mother Cabrini Shrine at Golden, Colorado, sits on a mountainside west of Denver with a long stone stairway climbing to a statue of the Sacred Heart and a spring the sisters attribute to her.

Saint John Neumann

John Neumann, a Bohemian immigrant and Redemptorist, became the fourth Bishop of Philadelphia and is credited with organising the first diocesan Catholic school system in the United States. He died in 1860 and was canonised by Pope Paul VI in 1977. His body is enshrined in a glass reliquary beneath the altar of the National Shrine of Saint John Neumann at St Peter the Apostle Church in Philadelphia, where he can be seen directly. Pilgrims uncomfortable with that should know that the practice is ancient. The same arrangement exists under altars across Rome.

Saint Katharine Drexel

Katharine Drexel was the daughter of a Philadelphia banking family who gave her inheritance to the founding of schools and missions for Black and Native American communities across the United States, established the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament, and founded Xavier University of Louisiana. She died in 1955 and was canonised by Pope John Paul II on 1 October 2000. Her tomb was moved from the motherhouse at Bensalem to the Cathedral Basilica of Saints Peter and Paul in central Philadelphia in 2018, where it now stands in a chapel open to anyone walking in off Logan Square. Her life and the racial history her work sits inside are covered on our page on Saint Katharine Drexel.

Blessed Solanus Casey

Solanus Casey was a Wisconsin-born Capuchin friar who was ordained as a simplex priest, meaning he was not permitted to preach doctrinal sermons or hear confessions, and who spent decades as the porter of monasteries in New York and Detroit. People came to the door in enormous numbers. He listened, prayed with them, enrolled them in the Seraphic Mass Association and told them to thank God ahead of time. He died in Detroit in 1957, and Pope Francis's beatification of him took place in Detroit on 18 November 2017. His tomb is at the Solanus Casey Center at St Bonaventure Monastery on Mount Elliott Street, in a part of the city that has been through everything Detroit has been through.

The pattern in these four lives is worth noticing before you visit any of them. Two were doorkeepers. One was an immigrant who arrived with nothing. One gave away a fortune. None of them held high office in the Church. The American shrines are mostly built over people who did unglamorous work for a long time without stopping.

14. Miami and the Immigrant Shrines

The Shrine of Our Lady of Charity in Miami, the Ermita de la Caridad, stands on Biscayne Bay in Coconut Grove and was built by Cuban exiles who arrived in south Florida after 1959. The building is a conical concrete structure oriented so that the congregation faces the altar and, beyond it, the water and Cuba. It was dedicated in 1973. The devotion is to Our Lady of Charity of El Cobre, Nuestra Senora de la Caridad del Cobre, the patroness of Cuba, whose original shrine is in the mountains of Oriente province.

The Ermita belongs to a category that runs through the whole American Church: the shrine built by an immigrant community to keep a devotion alive in a country that had never heard of it. Doylestown is one. The Vietnamese devotion to Our Lady of La Vang has produced shrines and chapels across the United States, including at the national shrine in Washington. Polish, Slovak, Lithuanian, Italian, Filipino, Haitian, Korean and Mexican communities have all done the same thing.

These shrines matter for a reason beyond sentiment. They are the physical record of the Church's actual composition in North America, which has never been a single culture. A pilgrim who visits only the grand basilicas gets a partial picture. A pilgrim who spends an hour in a storefront chapel in Hialeah or Queens or Chicago's Southwest Side, at a devotion carried here in someone's luggage, gets the rest of it.

15. Portland's Grotto and St Augustine

Two shrines at opposite corners of the continental United States mark the far ends of the map.

The Grotto, Portland, Oregon

The National Sanctuary of Our Sorrowful Mother, universally called The Grotto, occupies a wooded property in northeast Portland founded in 1924 by the Servite friars, whose order has kept the devotion to the Sorrows of Mary since the thirteenth century. The centrepiece is a cave carved into the base of a basalt cliff, holding a marble replica of Michelangelo's Pietà. An elevator runs up the cliff face to an upper garden of some sixty acres with a monastery, a chapel, a labyrinth of paths and a view across the Columbia River valley toward Mount St Helens. The devotion is to Mary's sorrows, the seven griefs of her life from Simeon's prophecy in Luke 2:35 to the burial of her son.

Our Lady of La Leche, St Augustine, Florida

Mission Nombre de Dios in St Augustine marks the landing site where the first parish Mass in what is now the continental United States was offered in 1565, at the founding of the oldest continuously occupied European settlement in the country. On the grounds stands the Shrine of Our Lady of La Leche, Nuestra Senora de la Leche y Buen Parto, Our Lady of the Milk and Happy Delivery, a Spanish devotion invoking Mary in pregnancy and childbirth. The shrine describes itself as the oldest Marian shrine in the United States. Couples struggling with infertility, women carrying difficult pregnancies and families in gratitude for safe deliveries come here constantly, and the intentions left at the shrine make that plain. A great tall cross stands on the waterfront beside it, visible from Matanzas Bay.

Source: The Grotto in Portland and Mission Nombre de Dios in St Augustine each publish their own histories, including the Servite foundation of 1924 and the 1565 landing and first Mass. The description of St Augustine as the oldest continuously occupied European settlement in the continental United States is the National Park Service's. The claim that the Shrine of Our Lady of La Leche is the oldest Marian shrine in the United States is the shrine's and the Diocese of St Augustine's own characterisation.

16. Lackawanna, New York

Our Lady of Victory National Shrine and Basilica in Lackawanna, on the industrial edge of Buffalo, is a marble and copper basilica standing in a neighbourhood of steel-town houses, and it was built by one priest with donations of a few cents at a time. Nelson Baker, a Civil War veteran who entered the seminary in middle age, spent his priesthood in this parish running an orphanage, an infant home, a hospital, a school and a maternity home for unmarried mothers at a time when almost nobody else would take them. He funded it through a mail appeal to women across the country, most of whom sent small amounts.

He built the basilica in the 1920s and it was consecrated in 1926, when Pope Pius XI designated it a minor basilica, an unusual distinction for a parish church in a working-class American suburb at that date. The interior is one of the more ornate spaces in North American Catholicism: marble from multiple countries, a great dome, angels carved throughout the building, and Nelson Baker's tomb in a side chapel.

His cause for canonisation is open and he was declared Venerable in 2011, which means the Church has recognised the heroic character of his virtues. He is not beatified and not canonised. Catholics may pray privately for his intercession, and public veneration of the kind given to a beatified person is not permitted. Getting that distinction right matters, and it applies to every cause in progress across this continent.

17. Canada's Other Pilgrim Roads

Beyond Montreal and Beaupre, Canada holds four more destinations that carry serious and continuing pilgrim traffic.

Notre-Dame-du-Cap, Trois-Rivieres, Quebec

The Shrine of Our Lady of the Cape at Trois-Rivieres, midway between Montreal and Quebec City, is the national shrine of Canada. The small stone church on the site was built in 1714 and the shrine describes it as the oldest church in Canada preserved in its original state. Two events in the nineteenth century made the place a pilgrimage centre. In the winter of 1879 parishioners needed to move stone across the St Lawrence and the ice would not form; the shrine's account holds that after prayer an ice bridge formed sufficient to carry the loads, and it is remembered as the Bridge of Rosaries. In 1888 three witnesses reported that the eyes of the statue of Our Lady in the small church opened. The large octagonal basilica beside it was completed in 1964.

Martyrs' Shrine, Midland, Ontario

The Martyrs' Shrine at Midland, on Georgian Bay in central Ontario, stands beside the reconstructed Jesuit mission of Sainte-Marie among the Hurons, the French mission to the Wendat that operated from 1639 to 1649. Five of the eight North American Martyrs died in this region, including Jean de Brebeuf and Gabriel Lalemant, killed in March 1649 during Haudenosaunee raids that ended the Wendat mission and scattered the Wendat nation. The shrine church was built in 1926. Pope John Paul II visited in September 1984. As at Auriesville, the honest account includes the war, the epidemics that preceded it, and the destruction of a nation, alongside the deaths of the missionaries.

Lac Ste. Anne, Alberta

Lac Ste. Anne, northwest of Edmonton, hosts an annual pilgrimage that has been held since 1889 and draws Indigenous Catholics from across western and northern Canada. First Nations, Metis and Inuit pilgrims come from across the prairies and the north each July for the days around the feast of Saint Anne, camping on the lakeshore, entering the water, and keeping a devotion that predates the province. Pope Francis made the pilgrimage to Lac Ste. Anne on 26 July 2022. Cree Catholics know the lake by names older than the French one, and the pilgrimage belongs to them.

Notre-Dame-de-Bon-Secours, Old Montreal

The Chapel of Notre-Dame-de-Bon-Secours, on Rue Saint-Paul in Old Montreal, is called the Sailors' Church, and models of ships hang from its ceiling, left by seamen in thanksgiving for safe passage on the St Lawrence. Saint Marguerite Bourgeoys, the founder of the Congregation of Notre-Dame and the first schoolteacher of Montreal, began the chapel in 1655 and the first stone building went up in 1675. The present chapel dates from 1771. Marguerite Bourgeoys was canonised by Pope John Paul II in 1982, the first woman saint of Canada, and her remains are in the chapel. An observation platform in the steeple looks out over the old port.

18. Kalaupapa, Molokai, Hawaii

Kalaupapa is a peninsula on the north shore of the island of Molokai in Hawaii, cut off from the rest of the island by high sea cliffs, and it is United States territory and an American pilgrimage site. From 1866 the Kingdom of Hawaii and later the territorial government forcibly exiled people diagnosed with Hansen's disease, leprosy, to this peninsula. Families were separated by law. People were landed and left. The settlement operated under enforced isolation for over a century.

Father Damien de Veuster, a Belgian priest of the Congregation of the Sacred Hearts, volunteered for the settlement in 1873 and stayed. He built houses and coffins, dressed wounds, organised water supply and farms, buried the dead, and fought the authorities for supplies. He contracted the disease himself and died at Kalaupapa on 15 April 1889 at the age of forty-nine. Pope Benedict XVI canonised him on 11 October 2009. Mother Marianne Cope, a Franciscan sister from Syracuse, New York, came to Hawaii in 1883, took charge of the care of women and girls at the settlement after Damien's death, ran it for thirty years and died there in 1918. Pope Benedict XVI canonised her on 21 October 2012.

Two churches remain standing at the settlement, including St Philomena at Kalawao, which Damien enlarged, and his original grave is there. His body was returned to Belgium in 1936 at the request of the Belgian government, and his right hand was returned to Kalaupapa and reinterred in the original grave in 1995. Saint Marianne Cope's remains were returned to Syracuse in 2005 and are now enshrined there.

Access to Kalaupapa is restricted. It remains a place where a small number of former patients have the legal right to live undisturbed, and it is administered as a national historical park with tightly controlled visiting arrangements that have changed more than once. Anyone planning to go must check the current arrangements with the National Park Service and the State of Hawaii directly, and must understand that they are entering a settlement where people were confined against their will and where residents' privacy comes before any pilgrim's itinerary.

Damien's life, the medical facts about Hansen's disease, his conflicts with the authorities and with his own superiors, and the famous public defence of his reputation are covered on our page on Saint Damien of Molokai. Kalaupapa belongs on this page and not on any list of Asia and Pacific sites. Hawaii is a state of the United States and Molokai is part of Maui County.

19. The Mission Trails of Texas and California

Two chains of Spanish colonial mission churches, one in south Texas and one along the California coast, are among the oldest Catholic buildings still standing and still in use in the United States, and both require an honest account of what happened at them.

The San Antonio missions

Five eighteenth-century Franciscan missions stand along a stretch of the San Antonio River. Four of them, Concepcion, San Jose, San Juan Capistrano and Espada, are preserved within San Antonio Missions National Historical Park and remain active parishes of the Archdiocese of San Antonio, with Mass celebrated in churches built in the 1700s. The fifth, Mission San Antonio de Valero, is the Alamo. The four park missions and the Alamo were together inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2015. A pilgrim can walk or cycle the trail between them along the river in a day, and Mission Concepcion holds original frescoes and is described by the National Park Service as the oldest unrestored stone church in the United States.

The California missions

Twenty-one missions were founded along the California coast between 1769 and 1823, beginning at San Diego under the Franciscan Junipero Serra. Most still stand and many function as parishes. Serra is buried at Mission San Carlos Borromeo del Rio Carmelo in Carmel. Pope Francis canonised him at the national shrine in Washington on 23 September 2015.

That canonisation is disputed, and the dispute deserves stating in the terms its holders use. Many Native Californian people and nations hold that the mission system subjected their ancestors to forced labour, corporal punishment, restriction of movement and the suppression of their languages and religions, and that the mission period coincided with catastrophic population collapse among Indigenous Californians through disease and disruption. They regard Serra as an architect of that system and object to his canonisation on those grounds. Statues of him have been removed and toppled in California cities. The Catholic position is that canonisation declares a person to be in heaven and worthy of veneration, and that it does not certify every action of their life or of the institutions they built. Both of those statements can be held at once, and a Catholic visiting the missions should hold them at once. Read the interpretive material the Native communities themselves have produced. Several missions now present it on site.

Source: the National Park Service publishes the history and interpretation of San Antonio Missions National Historical Park, including its description of Mission Concepcion as the oldest unrestored stone church in the United States, and UNESCO records the 2015 inscription of the San Antonio Missions on the World Heritage List.

The missions are still worth the pilgrimage. Standing in an adobe church at Carmel or San Juan Bautista, a person is standing in one of the oldest Catholic spaces in continuous use on the Pacific coast of North America, with everything that means in both directions.

20. How to Plan One That Works

A North American pilgrimage succeeds or fails on preparation, and the preparation is short. Four decisions cover almost all of it.

Choose one intention and name it out loud

A pilgrimage is a petition made with the body. Decide before you leave what you are asking for or repenting of, write it down, and carry it. Pilgrims who set out with no intention come back with photographs. Pilgrims who set out with a named intention come back changed, or at least come back having asked.

Build the trip around confession and Mass

Every shrine on this page hears confessions and offers Mass. Those two are the substance of the visit and everything else is arrangement. If you have been away from the sacraments for years, a shrine is one of the easiest places in the world to come back, because the priest hearing you has heard it before, does not know you, and will not see you again. Our page on the sacrament of confession walks through the form, the examination and what to say if you have forgotten how.

Chain two or three sites into a route

The strongest North American pilgrimages chain two or three sites in a region. Washington, Emmitsburg and Philadelphia. Milwaukee, Holy Hill and Champion. Montreal, Trois-Rivieres and Beaupre. Auriesville, Fonda and Kahnawake. Santa Fe and Chimayo. San Antonio's five missions on foot along the river. A chain gives the trip the shape of a journey, which is what pilgrimage means.

Walk something

Pilgrimage is a bodily act. Climb the stairs at Montreal, walk the last miles into Chimayo, take the outdoor Stations at Belleville or Holy Hill or the Grotto on foot rather than driving between them. The body prays and the mind follows. Every one of the great pilgrim roads, including the Camino de Santiago routes across Spain, is built on that assumption.

One last thing, and it is the reason to go this year rather than in some better season later. Nobody is guaranteed the trip they are postponing. Christ himself said that no one knows the day or the hour (Mark 13:32). The practical consequence of that teaching is plain. The thing you keep meaning to do, the confession you keep deferring, the intention you keep not naming, should be done now, while you have a car, a weekend and a working set of knees. Pick a shrine on this page. Put a date on it.