The New Allure of Sacred Pilgrimages (STA BREAKING NEWS and ARCHIVES)

by Theresa , Monday, December 22, 2014, 01:51

ARMY Staff Sgt. Juan Roldan was on patrol in Baghdad in 2006, when a warhead struck his vehicle, killing two colleagues. Sergeant Roldan suffered a blow to his spinal cord, a traumatic brain injury and severe damage to his legs, both of which had to be amputated above the knee. “When I first got injured, I was having nightmares, I was having anger issues,” he said. “I felt like I would have been better off dead.”

Last year, Sergeant Roldan traveled with dozens of other veterans, many in wheelchairs or hospital gurneys, from the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington to the town of Lourdes in southwest France. They were making a pilgrimage to the Catholic shrine to Saint Bernadette, a teenage girl who in 1858 claimed to have had multiple encounters with the Virgin Mary. At the climax of the event, Sergeant Roldan and his fellow pilgrims lined up to bathe in the town’s sacred waters.

These veterans are among the growing number of Americans joining the worldwide boom in spiritual travel. This growth comes at a time when organized religion around the world is feeling threatened. In the United States, surveys from Pew and others show that attendance is down, membership is down, even the number of people willing to define themselves as religious is down. A 2012 Gallup study of 39 countries (from Asia to Africa) found a “notable decline across the globe” in self-described religiosity, down 9 percent in just seven years.

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