Cardinal Parolin: ‘Pilgrimage based on mercy’

(Vatican Radio)  Cardinal Pietro Parolin, Vatican Secretary of State, on Monday (Nov. 16) addressed the XVIII National Theological-Pastoral Convention of the Opera Romana pellegrinaggi (ORP) on the theme of ‘Pilgrimage and mercy in the three great monotheistic religions’.

ORP is an institutional activity of the Vicariate of Rome under the Holy See, which organizes pilgrimages to the principal Christian sites, including Rome, Lourdes, Fatima, Santiago de Compostela, and the Holy Land.

Cardinal Parolin recalled the ancient roots of pilgrimage, especially after Emperor Constantine’s Edict of Milan in 313, when the faithful began to visit the tombs of early Christian martyrs.

In Medieval times, the pilgrimage took on a penitential aspect, to be lived as a trial of love, in order to receive mercy. Gradually, he said, this journey to obtain mercy was concretized in the “Jubilee of pardon”, that is, the first Holy Year celebrated in the year 1300, though the existence of periodic jubilee years can be found in the Old Testament.

“The common denominator”, Cardinal Parolin said, “is mercy, which constitutes the foundation upon which a true pilgrimage rests. With the decision to visit a holy place, in fact, the pilgrimage is characterized by a removal from day-to-day life in search of an encounter with the invisible and transcendent God, … in the certainty that the encounter can make fecund and provide meaning to the comings-and-goings of daily life, mediated by the ecclesial community.”

He concluded by saying, “In the Church, the pilgrim – as Pope Francis has written – acquires the awareness that ‘the beam which holds up the life of the Church is mercy. All her pastoral action should be turned toward the tenderness with which she encounters the faithful; nothing of her message and witness directed to the world may be deprived of mercy’.”