After 21 years and more than 150 pilgrimages, Steve Ray joins the Catholic Morning Show to explain what actually separates a pilgrimage from a vacation — and why the answer has nothing to do with the hotels. Asked to name the one pilgrimage a Catholic should make if they only ever make one, Steve points without hesitation to the Holy Land, the only place on earth where God walked with his own feet. He describes Mass inside the empty tomb, site-specific Scripture readings at Capernaum, and the reluctant pilgrim who walked out of Mass in tears.
Steve Ray — author, filmmaker, Catholic convert, and certified Holy Land guide — joins Deacon Mark Campbell just back from two September pilgrimages, one through the Catholic heritage of Ireland and another to Lourdes, Fatima, and sites across Portugal, Spain, and France. Steve shares that after 21 years of leading trips, including 100 groups through the Holy Land alone with the same Catholic Nazarene guide, recovery from jet lag now takes about a week instead of two days.
Steve unpacks what a pilgrimage actually is: the word "pilgrim" means a sojourner or foreigner traveling in a strange land, and the practice predates Christianity — the Holy Family went up to Jerusalem annually for the festivals, and Psalms 120 through 134 were sung on the ascent. A vacation is for rest and enjoyment; a pilgrimage is a search for God, where you leave your comfort zone, set down the phone, and encounter Scripture as something that happened in real space and time. Steve describes reaching under the altar at Calvary to touch the rock where the cross stood, entering the tomb and finding it still empty, and telling pilgrims that when the priest emerges after consecrating the Eucharist inside the Holy Sepulchre, they'll watch Jesus come out of the tomb again.
Asked which single pilgrimage matters most, Steve's answer is immediate: Rome, Poland, Fatima, and Lourdes are all sacred, but there is only one Holy Land, made holy because God himself came down and got his feet dirty. He describes praying every mystery of the Rosary at the place it happened, buying olive-wood rosaries in Bethlehem and touching them to each holy site to bring home to friends, and the Vatican permission that lets Franciscans use site-specific readings — so Mass at Capernaum ends with Jesus' Bread of Life discourse read within sight of the synagogue where he preached it. That moment, Steve says, is what turned one self-described "reluctant pilgrim," dragged along as payback for a fishing trip, into a man walking out of Mass with tears in his eyes.
Upcoming trips include a sold-out Saint Paul Mediterranean cruise in October following ten biblical sites through Turkey and Greece, plus Jordan and Israel, a Rhine River cruise through four European countries, and a saints-and-shrines tour of Italy from Milan to Rome. Find every itinerary and brochure at CatholicConvert.com — click the "start a pilgrimage here" banner at the top of the page.
Heard on the Catholic Morning Show, weekdays at 7 a.m. Central on Iowa Catholic Radio. More at IowaCatholicRadio.com.
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