The Camino de Santiago is the name for over 200 recognized pilgrimage routes mostly on the Iberian Peninsula, which cover anywhere from 60 to 500 miles, though there are 12 primary paths. It is also having a cultural moment, amplified by social media and a stream of TikTok influencers. My motivation for going, however, resisted the internet entirely. I wanted to align myself with the things that really matter: to gain perspective on four chaotic years of college, to process the recent death of my dad, and to refocus before starting a full-time job in the fall. I read all the same popular websites and travel guides as the secular pilgrim, but I quickly noticed that my awareness of the spiritual dimension of the Camino’s routine was unusual. 

I began the Portuguese Way in Vigo, Spain — 15 miles north of the Portuguese border — and walked roughly 86 miles to Santiago de Compostela. I also incorporated a spiritual variant involving a boat ride up the Ulla River — because it was popular, sounded mystical, and I could find an abundance of information about it (online, of course). And I brought to the Camino the prayers and the orientation toward the divine that I had practiced back home. Each day, as my body assumed the posture of the pilgrim — struggling lungs, hinged hips, steady footfalls — this heritage came to my aid. I repeated the Jesus Prayer, a short Orthodox petition for mercy as I walked, and my footsteps joined its rhythm. My backpack bore a ceremonial shell with the sword-cross of Saint James the Apostle, a symbol of the pilgrimage since the Middle Ages, which lightened my burden, reminding me that my journey had been shared by millions throughout the ages. The repetition of the hours — wake, walk, drink an espresso, walk some more, and attend Mass in the evenings — became a kind of prayer of its own — and this habit of prayer was encouraged and reflected by the environment.

Not everyone, however, was on the same journey. The Camino has been circulating on social media in part thanks to the 2023 re-release of Emilio Estevez’s 2010 film The Way, and his concurrent announcement that he is planning a sequel. In the movie, Estevez’s father, Martin Sheen, plays a grieving American father traveling to retrieve the body of his estranged son, who was killed while walking the Camino. He is joined by a crew of unlikely companions — each walking for reasons that have nothing to do with God — and ends up completing the pilgrimage himself in a journey of self-discovery. 

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Most of the TikToks and Instagram reels in which influencers now document their “day in the life” on the Way are in the same vein: non-religious, or not explicitly Christian. “Film for the dad lore album,” reads an Instagram caption written by Gabe Escobar, a model and content creator known for his spontaneous travel vlogs, while he stands in front of the journey’s culmination: the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela in Galicia, Spain. Escobar has said he’s not religious, though he is drawn to the beauty of the tradition. His daily videos detail the trials of solo hiking — trouble finding food, dehydration, foot pain, loneliness — accompanied by photos of beautiful vistas and happy smiles. 

The numbers reflect the widespread secular interest. In 2025, over 530,000 pilgrims received the Compostela, the certificate of completion given out in Santiago to pilgrims who have completed at least the last 62 miles on foot, a 6% increase from 2024. That figure is nearly ten times the figure from 25 years ago, with over a thousand pilgrims receiving the Compostela every day.

The majority of people I encountered along the Way were secular and wellness pilgrims. And it should be acknowledged that they were generous companions. In the city of Pontevedra, I shared cervezas and pimientos de Padrón with a woman named Catherine, who was willing to discuss matters of the spirit with a sincerity that would embarrass most dinner parties. She had recently quit her job and broken up with her long-term boyfriend, and felt like the Camino would help her make sense of the rupture in her life. She told me all of this within an hour of meeting. Though she was raised Catholic, she rejected the institution of the Church, and described herself as the classic “spiritual but not religious.” 

Another young guy I met at an albergue, who was traveling with his girlfriend, told me he was trying to do every route of the Camino, but that the churches themselves were “problematic” because the iconography of Saint James inside them was “Islamophobic.” He was referring to the representations of Santiago Matamoros — James the Moor-Slayer — which greet the pilgrim inside the cathedral, and in smaller churches all along the route. The apostle is depicted astride a white horse, sword raised above cowering Muslims, an image that originates in the legend of the Battle of Clavijo, in which James was said to have miraculously appeared to lead Catholic forces to victory during the Reconquista, a campaign to take back the Iberian Peninsula from Muslim rule. It is a stark image of violence and conquest, and a sore spot for the Church today, leading some cathedrals along the Camino to remove the statues entirely. 

Doubting the legend or the relics may be chalked up to ordinary skepticism, but rejecting the images inside the church is a different kind of act. To the pilgrim making it, it is a form of moral clarity, a rejection of violence and religious triumphalism, which fits neatly with contemporary commitments to social justice. I heard such claims used as a justification for continuing to walk a route that pilgrims associated with real violence. People are walking the Way in a spirit of resistance. 

The problem, however, is not that fellow pilgrims are not doing the Camino for the right reason — that is between them and God. It is rather that in conversation after conversation, I found a profound mistrust of the Church and the history that had established the route in the first place. The crisis, for me, came in realizing that the kind of personal growth most pilgrims wanted out of the walk was not merely indifferent to but at odds with the union with God that the Way was built to produce. One form of growth asks you to become more fully yourself through self-improvement, while the other asks you to be undone, to surrender as the pathway to transformation.

Self-improvement can be a positive goal, to be sure, and to seek change through transformative experience is not wrong. Saints throughout history have left their belongings and their communities, embarked on pilgrimages, and been transformed — by the desert, the pillar, the monastery, the mountain. There is a desire within most of us, in an age of information overload and the exhaustion it produces, for some shortcut to clarity, and the Camino presents itself as one. But treating this self-knowledge as the goal, rather than the byproduct, is a mistaken understanding of what its transformation is for. 

A challenge for the religious pilgrim, made difficult by the secular pilgrim’s logic, is not to confuse self-knowledge, however hard-won it may be, with knowledge of God and being in communion with Him. The pilgrimage, done well, prioritizes these two things properly. It strips away the routine of comfort that binds us to the material — through fatigue, blisters, hunger, loneliness, and thirst — so that what is left can be aligned with the vertical axis of the divine rather than the horizontal axis of the self. What I saw on the road, again and again, was pilgrims seeking the horizontal, when the route had been built to point upwards.

Unbelievers are helped in their skepticism by the status of the Camino as legend. The Apostle James was martyred in Jerusalem, beheaded, as recorded in the Book of Acts. The Camino commemorates a legend, not confirmed by the historical record, that his disciples carried his body by boat to Spain, near what is now Santiago de Compostela. This legend appeared only in the 9th century, when a hermit named Pelagius reported following a field of unusual stars to an abandoned Roman-era burial ground and found remains that the local bishop, Theodomir, declared to be James’s and those of his two disciples. In 1075, King Alfonso VI began building a church over the spot to house the relics, and pilgrims have been walking to it ever since. My path along the Ulla River is said to be the one they took. 

This background makes for a kind of plausible deniability employed by both Catholic and secular pilgrims. One can walk the entire route and arrive at the cathedral without having to affirm that the bones inside are real, providing a means of transformation without any demands of belief attached. And for the pilgrim already inclined to distrust institutional religion, the issues surrounding Santiago Matamoros offer a clean exit. 

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And yet the Way did not work only on the religious pilgrim — it was a kind of gift to all who embarked on it, even the unbelievers, and this might be the strongest evidence for what the Camino still is, underneath what it has become. One day, I walked with a woman who had done the Camino before. She told me she no longer believed James’s body is actually in the cathedral, and yet, upon arriving, found herself overwhelmed by it regardless. She lacked adequate explanation, though she tried. On another day, I met a woman who said she had been raised Catholic but was now agnostic. She told me that she had been reading the same poem — a Polish poem called “Pilgrim” — to herself each morning since the second day of the walk, unsure why she had started or why she continued. I also kept meeting a Polish family, first at the airport, again in the port city of Vigo, then at a roadside cafeteria, who told me that in Polish custom, meeting the same people three times means you must share a coffee. I felt something of the Camino’s own logic in that: by coincidence or by choice, in sharing a story, a coffee, or a bunk bed in an albergue, we found a kind of communion with each other, as if we were all simply meeting again, somewhere along the way, coming home.

The Camino raises a question that secular pilgrims don’t expect to be asked, one gesturing toward an encounter that can’t be conveyed through the internet.

I felt this acutely on my final day of walking. My body was running on too little communal albergue sleep, and the last of my reserves ran dry with roughly six uphill miles still to go. I ducked into a chapel in the historic town of Padrón, to rest my legs, pray, and rehydrate. While I was admiring the interior, trying to talk myself into the last stretch, I noticed a small angel holding a heart carved with my dad’s initials. That glimmer of the familiar, on a day I had nothing left, carried me the rest of the way.

It was a reminder that nothing on the Camino is the result of hard work alone. Every step is, in the end, a gift: the body carries you; generous patrons have built and maintained the road; between towns, strangers leave fruit and water. Ultimately, grace keeps you going on the day you would rather stop. The secular pilgrim is attuned to graciousness and hospitality, but as far as I could tell, the secular framework has no category for gift in the deeper sense — it can’t account for the poem the woman reads with no explanation, or the feeling of awe upon arriving at the bones whose authenticity one has doubted. It can account for effort, for achievement, for personal meaning made from an experience, but it has no place for the unearned or the miraculous. Gift is precisely what falls outside the framework of self-transformation, and it is what the Camino keeps insisting on, through nothing more dramatic than daily repetition of walking and fatigue, which regularly calls forth the mercy and friendship of strangers, even to those who did not come looking for it.

I am not Catholic. I attended the Pilgrims’ Mass at the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela as a respectful guest and sat in shared reverence alongside people I had walked with — some for only a few hours, others for days. I did not cry or fall to my knees in awe upon reaching the cathedral. If anything, it felt more like a mixture of gratitude mixed with grief: gratitude for the thing itself, grief that so many arriving with me had been handed so little equipment for understanding what the thing was.

When self-transformation is the destination, the self remains at the center, perhaps to be enlarged, maybe even clarified, but it is still the organizing principle of the journey. The pilgrim returns home more herself, her pack lighter, her tolerance for discomfort improved. This is an accomplishment, right? But it is not what the tradition that built this road had in mind. The great pilgrims of the Church did not walk in order to become more fully themselves. They walked in order to become less themselves, specifically, to arrive at a place where the self, spent and humbled, might finally be available to something other than its own reflection.

The cathedral received us all, believers and unbelievers alike, and this, I suspect, is both the Camino’s great gift and its peculiar danger. It receives everyone. It transforms the terms of no one’s arrival. You have walked the Way, and you have reached the cathedral, and you are offered a next step. Whether to take it or not is up to you.

On finishing the novel, I immediately started in on Pessoa: An Experimental Life by Richard Zenith. Admittedly, a 1,000-page tome about a spectacularly odd writer whose life, Zenith admits some 700 pages in, was “uneventful”, isn’t for everybody. And it confirmed my suspicion that Pessoa’s importance lies less in the quality of his writing than in the extraordinary novelty of his inner world. It seems ultimately fitting that Pessoa is interred next to de Gama, the first European to reach India by sea. Although in his 47 years on earth he rarely left his beloved Lisbon, he was an intrepid voyager of the inner cosmos, a discoverer of new worlds within the fathomless depths of the self. In the vast yet claustrophobic matrix of our online era, where identity is a febrile, paranoid play of masks and veils, his strange life story feels strikingly modern — and singularly poignant.

Pessoa is best known in the Anglophone world for his work of world-weary philosophical fragments and melancholy reveries, The Book of Disquiet, and for his unique mode of authorship. The aforementioned host of heteronyms each produced work in a distinctive style, and each bore a unique biography, character, ideological outlook, and even signature which Pessoa — like a child who never outgrew his imaginary friends — practised writing in his notebooks. Outwardly unassuming and diffident, Pessoa was a literary volcano that never stopped erupting — poems, essays, fictions, fragments, dialogues, and polemics spewed forth from his restless pen. But when it came to publishing, let alone self-publicising, he was hesitant to the point of self-effacement. In the final stretches of Pessoa: An Experimental Life, we find him still agonising over whether to publish a book at all (Mensagem, the only book of Portuguese poetry he published in his lifetime, appeared the year before his death).

He left behind a vast archive of work, much of it stored in his famous trunk, and much of it in varying states of incompletion. Pessoa was a champion unfinisher: project after project was started and then abandoned, or existed only on the many lists of future works he drew up for his gang of heteronyms to one day get round to. “None of it got written except for a brief opening paragraph,” reads a typical sentence in Zenith’s book. While some literary biographies dazzle with drama, Pessoa’s is remarkable for everything he didn’t do: have sex, publish much of anything, go anywhere. Norman Mailer he was not. Pessoa’s “experimental” life could no less accurately be called ineffectual — until you recall where his tomb now rests, and then it seems he wasn’t so ineffectual after all.

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The key events in Fernando Pessoa’s life can be listed in a few lines. He was born into a comfortably bourgeois Lisbon family in 1888, which later relocated to Durban in South Africa. They returned to Portugal in 1905 after the better part of a decade and, for the rest of his life, Pessoa would never travel further from Lisbon than its nearby seaside resort towns Estoril and Cascais. As an adult he mostly made money writing business letters for various firms, and in a farcically inept venture, he established a printing and publishing press, Ibis, which quickly went out of business. He had a low-energy dalliance with a young woman named Ophelia, but eventually he spurned her affections. Almost certainly he was a closeted homosexual who died a virgin. Throughout his adulthood he hung out with fellow literati in Lisbon’s cafes, drank increasing volumes of wine and brandy, and wrote incessantly.

So much for the outward life. Uniquely, Pessoa: An Experimental Life begins with a “Dramatis Personae” of figures who existed only in its subject’s imagination. Pessoa distinguished his heteronyms from conventional pseudonyms: “Pseudonymous works are by the author in his own person, except in the name he signs; heteronymous works are by the author outside his own person. They proceed from a full-fledged individual created by him, like the lines spoken by a character in a drama he might write.” Pessoa had no wife or children and few close friends, but he dwelled in a clamorous psychic world of prolific literary companions who argued against, formed alliances, and otherwise engaged with one another. The three most important heteronyms were the Whitmanesque (and bisexual) Álvaro de Campos, the stately classicist Ricardo Reis, and Pessoa’s acknowledged “master”, Alberto Caeiro, who wrote serene bucolic verse and believed “that things are exactly what they seem to be”.

As Zenith quips in his prologue, “one could say that Portugal’s four greatest poets from the twentieth century were Fernando Pessoa”. Each was as fully imagined as the characters a novelist invents to populate his fictions, only the novel the heteronyms inhabited was the life of their author, Fernando Pessoa. And like a novelist dreaming up his characters, Pessoa experienced that strange necromancy of channelling voices that seemed to exist somehow beyond himself, that were more than their creator. Pessoa occasionally found himself writing better than he could write — achieving, through the schizoid ventriloquism of being possessed by his heteronyms, poetic effects that seemed to him beyond his own capacities. No stranger to mystical cosmologies, Pessoa toyed with the idea that his heteronyms were actually existing selves, conscious entities dwelling in a multitiered universe. At least to his own mind, Pessoa’s pursuit of writing unlocked hidden levels of the cosmic architecture. He was given to asking himself such deranging ontological questions as whether his alter-egos were his inventions, or he was theirs — whether he was nothing more nor less than “a series of dreams about me dreamed by someone outside me”.

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Such cases of innovation in literary form facilitating metaphysical discovery are rare but not unheard of. In the mid-Seventies, a few decades after Pessoa’s death, the science fiction writer Philip K. Dick underwent a dramatic cosmic revelation (or psychotic breakdown, depending on one’s point of view) that prompted him to declare: “My novels and stories were, without my realising it consciously, autobiographical.” Dick spelled all this out to a dumbfounded science-fiction conference audience in France in a speech with the unbeatable title, “If You Find This World Bad, You Should See Some of the Others” (it reportedly took his listeners a while to realise Dick wasn’t merely detailing the plot of his latest novel). In the wake of his awed intimations of what today’s physicists tentatively call the multiverse, Dick became avidly interested in religious, esoteric and Gnostic thought, trying for the rest of his life to make sense of his shattering visionary experience.

Pessoa was likewise fascinated by such subjects as would come to preoccupy Dick. He wrote hundreds of poems and pages on esotericism and was fluent in the practices and theories of astrology, seances, Theosophy, Hermeticism, Kabbalah, secret societies, alchemy, and magic. Among the phases of literary influence he passed through was one spent in thrall to the Symbolist movement seeded by Charles Baudelaire, whose doctrine of “correspondences” — “whereby we who walk the world are said to pass through ‘forests of symbols’ that give us ‘knowing looks’” — was indebted to the mystical philosopher Emanuel Swedenborg. At the age of 42, Pessoa enjoyed a brief but mutually enriching friendship with the notorious magus and tabloid-favourite Aleister Crowley — a.k.a. the Great Beast 666 — after Pessoa wrote to him offering astrological advice and attaching some of his poems. (Their relationship fizzled out after Crowley visited Lisbon, recruited Pessoa to help him stage his own suicide, and then scarpered to Berlin.) Habitually staying up till the small hours drinking brandy and working on his texts, Pessoa wrote like a warlock-alchemist bent on transforming self and reality.

The cosmological conclusion Pessoa drew from his reading and writing was that there exist multiple levels of reality, and our grossly material, earthbound lives are but shadows of our true being on a higher, more brilliant plane. Although he took a keen interest in his nation’s political life, Pessoa became ever more hermetically devoted to the search for hidden mysteries and secret knowledge — gnosis. A letter he wrote to a young literary acquaintance in the final year of his life offers as clear a statement as any of Pessoa’s spiritual beliefs. In it, he professed his faith in “the existence of worlds higher than our own and in the existence of beings that inhabit those worlds”, and posited “various, increasingly subtle levels of spirituality that lead to a Supreme Being, who presumably created this world. There may be other, equally Supreme Beings who have created other universes that coexist with our own, separately or interconnectedly.” He suspected himself of being guided by higher forces, a mysterious Master or Masters hidden behind the veil of material reality: “Emissary of an unknown king, / I carry out hazy instructions from beyond.” When, like W.B. Yeats (to whom he also wrote letters), Pessoa began conducting experiments in automatic writing, one of the “spirits” who seized hold of his pen told him: “You are the centre of an astral conspiracy.”

Genius, in other words, was a matter of destiny — and Pessoa’s destiny, he believed, was to win in death an immortal glory that would invert his obscurity in his own lifetime. When he was not yet 40, he wrote in a letter to a newspaper (typically left unfinished and unsent): “I feel younger every year because every year I am nearer to having never achieved anything in life… I have never made a real effort after anything, nor applied my attention strongly except to futile, unnecessary and fictional things.” For all his idler’s defiance, Pessoa was not untouched by the sadness of life unlived, of having done little with his existence other than daydream and scribble. In one of his reveries, Bernardo Soares, the heteronym that authored the scraps that make up The Book of Disquiet, recollects in one of his reveries the sense of mystery and wonderment he felt as a child on attending Mass. Soares confides to his diary an admission that, in light of Pessoa’s gnostic intimations of exile from divine origins, is doubly moving: “What I am would be unbearable if I couldn’t remember what I’ve been.”

Pessoa’s greatest outpouring of writings on esotericism occurred between 1931-1934, ending the year before he died. Acquaintances remarked on how, towards the end of his life, preoccupied with mortality, he gave off an otherworldly, mysterious, sage-like impression, as if he was only half here, half already in the beyond. Pessoa’s great Argentine contemporary, Jorge Luis Borges, admitted in old age that he found himself impatient with the mundane concerns of daytime, eager to get back to night with its far more serious business of dreaming. Pessoa — a writer who, had he not existed, Borges might have dreamed up — was likewise a man whose commitment to inaction, dreams, fantasy and the imagination went against the grain of modern life.

Ultimately, the Scottish poet and aphorist Don Paterson was not wrong, I think, when he remarked that the idea of reading Pessoa generally trumps the actual experience. The chief subjects of The Book of Disquiet, tedium and weariness (tédio and cansaço in the Portuguese language which, Pessoa once suggestively observed, has “no bones”), are hardly the most exciting or fertile of literary themes. Still, amid a culture frenzied with productivity and achievement, it’s refreshing to spend time in the company of so orientally inclined a writer, for whom “Action is a disease of thought.” Although Pessoa’s inner world was far richer than the abject Metaverse Mark Zuckerberg and his cohorts would have us live inside, aren’t we all, with our multiple online selves and our crowded-lonely worlds of techno-fantasy, living Pessoan lives now? His posthumous renown as Portugal’s great modern poet notwithstanding, it may be that Fernando Pessoa’s real achievement was only secondarily at the avant-garde of literature, and primarily at that of selfhood.

On the 13^th day of the month for the next six months, the Virgin appeared again to the children, who had begun to tell their story more widely, attracting visitors. Apparently, 70,000 people gathered for the sixth apparition. First it rained, heavily. Then the sun danced in the sky and, for ten minutes, fell upon them as if a ball of fire. People were running around, terrified, confessing their sins. This sixth apparition became known as “the miracle of the sun”.

Today, the village of Fátima is transformed into a vast Catholic Disneyland, a sort of stadium of religion to which more than five million people make pilgrimage every year. Some make the last part of the journey crawling on their knees, the path smeared with the blood of those who decide not to use knee-pads. I was blown away by the place. The intensity was highly infectious. One man pushes the buggy of his child down the hill, on his knees. One women crawls on all fours, clearly distressed. Many are assisted by family members, holding their hands.

At one end of the complex, the Basilica of the Most Holy Trinity is a twenty-first century modernist-style circular building, seating 8,633. In the huge open-air space between the basilica and the main chapel where the shepherds are buried, hundreds of thousands of people can gather for Mass. And everywhere on the site, people are praying, lighting candles, sitting quietly, and milling around. Mass is broadcast on the radio to all of Portugal every day – Fátima has its own newspaper and television studio.

This is the sort of religion that so-called ‘thinking people’ tend to dismiss scornfully as popular superstition – “the religion of feeble minds” – as Edmund Burke once called it. But I have something of a soft spot for this sort of superstition, and regret that I have been distanced from it by a ploddingly empirical, secular education that means I find it all but impossible to suspend my disbelief.

Why is it that we are able to understand dreams as forms of leakage from our unconscious inner life, revealing important truths about ourselves, but refuse to do something similar about places like Fátima – understanding them as if they were forms of cultural leakage from the collective unconscious, revealing important truths about our collective condition, truths that are not easily otherwise articulated? My dreams are no less mad than the apparitions at Fátima, often (like religion) a peculiar blend of sex and violence. But whereas Freud made it respectable for thinking people to take their dreams seriously, it is still far from intellectually respectable for people to take superstition seriously – the work of Carl Jung notwithstanding.

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The key to understanding the massive popular appeal of Fátima is surely to be found in the date, 1917: the First World War, the Russian Revolution, and, a few months later – probably most impactful of all in rural Portugal – the Spanish flu epidemic that resulted in the deaths of between 50 and 100 million people, between 3% and 5% of the world’s population. Within two years of their vision of the Virgin, two of the children had themselves died from this flu. In such a world, where does all the fear and grief and anger go to get processed?

The First Portuguese Republic, which had overthrown the monarchy in 1910, was actively hostile to the Church. Church schools and monasteries were closed. Religious orders and the ringing of church bells were banned. The wearing of clerical clothes in public was banned. Fátima was religious populism springing up as a groundswell of resistance against the totalising ideology of state atheism. And there is something of a class aspect to all of this. The Fátima pilgrims were, and continue to be, generally working class. Their cultural despisers are generally middle class

Thinking people, as I am calling them disparagingly, tend to insist that the first question to ask of superstitious religion is whether it is true. This, they presume, is the ultimate question on which everything turns. But I suspect it is not such an important question after all – imagine thinking the first thing to ask about your dream is whether it was true or not. Surely the most significant thing to ask is what it means and where it comes from. Only when you have established this – and that’s not easy – will the question of its truth become askable at all.

Post-truth was chosen by the Oxford Dictionaries as their “word of the year” in 2016, following Brexit and Trump’s election win. Post-truth politics is when something important is carried for people in a form that is not necessarily literally true. Fiction is an obvious example. I can believe Dostoyevsky’s novels contain great and important truth without having to believe they are true. In Concluding Unscientific Postscript, the philosopher Kierkegaard makes a distinction between subjective truth and objective truth, believing the former to be far more important when it comes to Christianity. Indeed, for Kierkegaard, something can be subjectively true even when objectively false. Post-truth is the name recently given to the emergence of this sort of attitude within politics, and it has more than a passing resemblance to superstition.

Thinking people hate it, rail against it, spit blood to the wind and Twitter. But it has long been with us. And it won’t ever go away. “Superstition is a part of the very being of humanity” wrote Goethe, as the Enlightenment sought to do away with it, “and when we fancy that we are banishing it altogether, it takes refuge in the strangest nooks and crannies, and then comes forth again as soon as it believes itself to be safe.”

I loved Fátima. And was overwhelmed by the emotional power of the populism it channelled. Those pilgrims scraping their bloody knees on the concrete are the beating heart of the Church. Our Lady has inspired them to an act of great devotion. And they have inspired me. I won’t ever forget the place.

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