Pints With Aquinas - My Favorite Pilgrimage Sites | Fr. Gregory Pine, O.P.

Episode Date: August 31, 2024

Father Pine talks about his favorite pilgrimage sites, and gives recommendations for you! Support The Show: https://mattfradd.locals.com 📖 Fr. Pine's Book: https://bit.ly/3lEsP8F 🖥️ Website: https://pintswithaquinas.com/ 🟢 Rumble: https://rumble.com/c/pintswithaquinas 👕 Merch: https://shop.pintswithaquinas.com 🚫 FREE 21 Day Detox From Porn Course: https://www.strive21.com/ 🔵 Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mattfradd 📸 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mattfradd  

Hello, my name is Father Gregory Pine and I am a Dominican friar of the province of St. Joseph. I teach at the Dominican House of Studies and I work for the Thomistic Institute and this is Pine to the Quinas. Pilgrimages are often an occasion in which to deepen our conversion. As we either travel to a holy place or travel with a holy intent and as we kind of put ourselves through the paces or spiritual exercises, God uses that as a way by which to heal us and grow us, to fix us more firmly in Him, even as we ourselves are on the way. In my own life, pilgrimages have played a big part in my conversion, in my vocation, in my ongoing formation, and I'm super grateful for those opportunities. So I thought that I would curate a little list and give some recommendations as to sweet pilgrimage places

that you might visit. So here we go. So I have talked on the podcast before about my family. We took a pilgrimage as a family when I was three years old to Medjugorje. And then on the basis of that experience, my mom and dad opened a little Catholic bookshop in our town, Newtown, Pennsylvania, called Salvia Regina Catholic Books and Gifts. And from that shop, they then took pilgrimages, mostly to Medjugorje, but to other Marian shrines in Europe.

And so my family wasn't a big vacation family, we were more of a pilgrimage family. And so we went often to Medjugorje, and that played a big part in my own ongoing conversion, vocation and formation. And that was part of the story of my experiencing a call to the priesthood and religious life and besides. So when talking about Medjugorje, the church has said that you can go there, you can go there as a parish or as a diocese. So it's not a determinative judgment as to this is definitely supernatural. So we speak of the

alleged apparitions at Medjugorje, but you're free to go or not to go. But that's just to say it's been a big part of my own formation. I also think when people talk about pilgrimages, they'll often think of it as something really far away. But I'd say, you know, like a local pilgrimage might be the move as well. So before, you know, going further afield to South America and to Europe and besides, maybe a word about these United States. So I'd recommend to you as a pilgrimage site, the city of Philadelphia. Not just because Philadelphia is the greatest city in the world, or because it has the greatest sports teams in the world, but because it's the city of saints.

So St. John Neumann is buried there at St. Peter's on 5th and Girard, and St. Catherine Drexel is buried there at the Cathedral Basilica of St. Peter and Paul in Center City. And then there are other cool shrines in the city as well. So you've got St. Rita of Cassia, and you've got the Miraculous Metal Shrine, and you've got Our Lady of Chesterhove out there in Doylestown, and there are others. So it's a sweet place with a lot of Catholic history, with a lot of Catholic life. So Philly. Now does that mean that Philly is better than all other places and all other places stink besides? Well, no, it's hard. No, just kidding. So there are other places obviously, so there are plenty of saints in the United States

You've got st. Francis Avery Gabbini there in in New York and st. Elizabeth Ann Seton there in Emmitsburg, Maryland You got blessed Stanley Rother out Oklahoma City Way. You've got Yeah, you've got various Saints and blessed Throughout I was recently in North Dakota visiting You Mary in Bismarck and I watched a little documentary on servant of God Michelle Dupont who among other things was a daughter, a sister, a friend and a focus missionary and who died at a young age of very aggressive kind of cancer. So you can ask her parents if you can visit the Dupont family burial site. Yeah, so lots of cool things going on in the United States, so don't feel like you have

to go far afield if it's something that's near at hand. And folks, you can drop in the comments various places that you like to visit here in the United States, whether it's the California Missions or Lady of Champion or other things still. Okay. Yeah, beyond that, okay, so then thinking further afield, you've got big, big places that the church kind of has traditionally assigned a big importance to. So that'd be like Rome, Santiago de Compostela, the Holy Land. I think in the medieval period of the

church, Our Lady of Walsingham was also considered as a, not equivalent to, but at least in the same conversation as those things. I hiked the Camino, like part of it, from Astorga to Santiago de Compostela. And I guess I didn't anticipate how meaningful it would be, purposeful it would be, because it's like we're walking. Cool. Walking. I mean, I think a lot of us, whilst walking, we probably like listen to something or pray

the rosary or kind of like skip the experience. But then you come to discover like walking, that's the whole experience. That was what I felt while pilgrimaging. It's like I couldn't get anything else done because pilgrimage was all-encompassing. Just took up your whole day, your whole mental space, your whole tolerance for pain. So as your body comes to pieces, it just kind of tenderizes you and opens you up to sweet conversations with people whom you might have planned or whom you might not have planned to journey together with. All right, so that was awesome. I really do commend that and it's super cheap if you can manage it. Just like find plane tickets at a weird time and you stay at these albergues which can cost as little as like you know 10 bucks. It's awesome.

And then on that list, I've never been to the Holy Land, I've never been to Our Lady of Walsingham, Rome. Right, so there are so many things in Rome just hundreds of Baroque churches one Gothic Church Which is the Dominican Church of Santa Maria Sobermanerva where st. Catherine of Siena is buried not her head but her body also blessed John of Yesole also known as Fra Angelico the famous painter just Google that you'll recognize his paintings And you've also it's like are you just gonna tell me about the Dominican things in the city of Rome? Yes So Pope St. Pius the fifth off the also a Dominican is buried there in Santa Maria Maggiore

And you've got the kind of foundational Church of the order or the orders Headquarters there at Santa Sabina, which is up on the Aventine Hill just above the circus Maximus obviously, there are other things like St. Peter's and Apostles. Okay, but Rome, obvi. Okay. All right, now this next section is entitled Cool Stuff in Southeastern France. So when I was studying abroad in Austria as part of Franciscan University's program there, I was like, I would like to go to La Salette because my family are kind of like apparition chasers and La Salette is this cool Marian shrine that is just weird for one, but also out of the way and no one visits, so those are all attractive to me. Our Lady appeared to two children, Melanie and Maxine, who, yeah, it was like pretty dolerous as far as messages go.

She like showed up crying. She said that her son's arm was heavy. She lamented the current state of France in the post-revolutionary period. Like some people didn't think it was real, including the curie of ours, St. John Vianney, that the young kids, they didn't age well. Their lives were kind of tragic. They tried vocations that didn't go and then blah, blah, blah, this and such. So just like sad. It's just a sad spot, but it's up in the French Alps. I got there on a moped. I think it's my only moped experience, but I arrived too late for the bus. The taxi cost a billion dollars and I was too young to rent a car. So I mopeded my way up there. It started raining. I laid the bike down twice. Good thing I was wearing boat shoes. It involved

some water skiing. I think I had like 15 minutes at the shrine because it took me so long to get there and so long to get back because I was like headed straight up like a bewildering 17 kilometers per hour and then going downhill I was afraid that I was going to die. So I stopped at intervals so as to catch my breath Nevertheless, La Salette moonscape Dolores cool Also, totally different vibe is La Saint-Bum, which is maybe like an hour to the north-ish of Marseille, where the relics of Saint Mary Magdalene are. So Saint Mary Magdalene is said to have traveled to the south of France after our Lord's ascension and evangelized the area, but she spent a lot of time in this grotto carved out of this

rock and so her relics, part of her relics are there. I want to say it's like an arm bone or a leg bone, maybe it's a leg bone, maybe a femur, I've forgotten exactly. And then there's the sweet chapel at the top of the hill in which the grout lies where she is said to have prayed. And then just not too far you have the town of Saint Maximin and the Basilica of Saint Marie-Madeleine and Saint Maximin and you also have her cranium there. So just a beautiful region and the Dominicans run, this is a theme, Dominican stuff, Dominicans run a retreat center there at the saint bumme so i recommend it hardly also in the southeast of france you have

en-ci where saint francis de sails and saint jane francis de chantal are buried and where you have the beginning of his ministry as a bishop and her life as a religious so the first visitation convents really cool stuff and then pari limoniale, which is where St. Margaret Mary Alacocke received the visions of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, and where she's buried, and also her saintly confessor, spiritual director, Blessed Cod Colombier. So Southwest of France, that's just skimming the surface too. There's a lot of other cool people in the Southwest of France. Now going to, excuse me, that was the Southeast of France, now we're going to the Southwest of France. Now going to excuse me that was the southeast of France

now we're going to the southwest of France things get wild and Dominican ish. Okay so Toulouse is an awesome beautiful city it's like the Rose City because the brick there is really beautiful and warm but that's where Saint Thomas Aquinas is buried or his relics are and the Couvant de Chacobin which no longer belongs to the order belongs to the state and you have to pay to get in there, which is brutal. But if you go with the Dominican, he gets in for free and you can celebrate Mass, which is awesome. Really moving. Also, the first house of the Dominican order there, no one visits it and it probably shouldn't be on this list except that it's me, so it's on this list. And then the place where Saint Dominic saw kind

of like the vision of the order and he saw the sign of God descending upon a place where he founded the first convent of nuns is just outside of Toulouse and Fongeau. So, awesome. Okay, continuing the theme of cool Dominican stuff that you would probably never visit except that it is now recommended to you under the rubric of cool Dominican stuff, check out Bologna in the north of Italy. If you're going to the north of Italy, you're probably gonna go for like a Blessed Pier Giorgio for Saudi, soon to be St. Pier Giorgio for Saudi pilgrimage, because that's gonna be bopping for like the next few years. That's around Turin. You're gonna wanna visit Turin, where he was born, where he worshiped, grew up,

and you're gonna wanna visit Pallone, his summer house, and then Europa, the Marian shrine, to which he often hiked and spent a lot of time in prayer and devotion. All right, so that's cool. That's awesome. But if you head from Turin back towards the center of the peninsula, you get to Milan and bop down from Milan, you get to Bologna where guess who is buried? That's right.

St. Dominic. All right. If you want to continue your Dominican pilgrimage on the Italian peninsula, you can do some sweet visits to things associated with St. Thomas Aquinas. Not to make this an infinite list, but I really enjoyed a visit to Aquino slash Rocaseca where he was born, Monte Cassino where he spent 11 years as a Benedict and Oblate, oh yeah, Saint Benedict and Saint Scholastica are buried there, and then Fossa Nova which is a Cistercian monastery now run by the Institute of the

Incarnate Word where he died. So those are all in the same region. I did that as a day pilgrimage with three other Dominican friars and it was awesome. And then I had a layover on a train between Freberg, Switzerland and Maastricht, Netherlands or Sittard, the Netherlands. I don't remember exactly which but I was like I wonder if the answer is yes. Not only is there a sweet dome church right next to the train station but also St. Albert the Great, the teacher of St. Thomas Aquinas, is buried 10 minute walk at St. Andrew's Church, St. Andreas, and you can just pray at St.

Albert the Great's tomb, which is incredible. Okay, Fr. Gregory, back off the turbo Dominican story and tell me other things. So a couple of big Marian shrines that I have not yet mentioned to this point. When you think about Europe you're probably thinking like, okay, he covered La Salette, but other places, please? So you got, you know, Rue de Bac in Paris, Pont-Main, which is out like Brittany Way, but the big place in France is Lourdes, you know, and that's not too terribly far from Toulouse, so link them up. And then, you know, the other biggest Marian shrine, I think, in Europe would be Fatima.

I visited Lourdes at the age of eight. I remember taking a sleeper car from Paris to Lourdes with my family. Cool way to just experience life. One member of my family accidentally pulled the emergency brake. I would recount that story, but it might cause flashbacks. I would say that it was hilarious, except that it wasn't for anyone involved. It was I who precipitated the event because I asked someone to turn on the light so I could finish sorting my baseball cards. The good news is that I did finish sorting my baseball cards as light was provided given that the emergency break had been pulled. Nevertheless, Lourdes is beautiful. So you know the gov there, that river that runs through where there was this grotto, the grotto of Massabielle, where our lady

appeared to Saint Bernadette and asked her to do some wild things, penance for poor sinners specifically, but to come back to that place and to wait on her word. And that message has been a message of healing for subsequent generations, a healing which issues from Our Lady the Immaculate Conception. So I volunteered in the baths again during the semester that I spent in Gamming with James and Sean. It was awesome. It was really beautiful. Actually, my little team of people working in the Baz

was composed of me, a man named Michael, a man named Raphael, and a man named Gabriel. So if you need angelic help, go to Lord's. But it's beyond that, you know, it's like, you have these processions and these basilicas and these, I mean it's just awesome. It's an immersive experience, a sacramental life and a devotional life of a really rich sort.

And then Fatima is similar, but in a very different environment. So Portugal, obviously. But there, Our Lady appeared to these three children in kind of eschatological or kind of end timesy fashion. Two of them died young. Sister Lucia, I think servant of God Lucia, lived many years hence. But that's a powerful powerful message and you see people there in acts of penance and acts of prayer As they kneel their way towards the apparition shrine where our lady first appeared over the Ajan Jera bush

I can't pronounce that word So don't repeat me or in the apparition where she appeared at a distance from that Original site because the children were prevented from meeting her there out in the fields there I think that was the August apparition, you know, so you think of The first apparition and then the last apparition in October the day the Sun danced The subject of one of the best CCC movies of all time But I went there twice once for Holy Week and then once at the beginning of a pilgrimage my family Both of which were super beautiful, right?

super beautiful, right? Super beautiful. Okay, and then some random ones. Okay, so far our categories have been, Father Gregory talks about his family, Father Gregory talks about the United States of America, bopped through some of the big ticket items, and then the southeast of France, and then the southwest of France, and that reminded me of a bunch of cool Dominican things, and then we talked about big Marian apparition sites, and now just like a couple random ones. I was at Nock kind of by accident, kind of by not accident in in Ireland. Our Lady never spoke so she appeared to a kind of mix of people, arrayed with a variety

of figures but the central figure being the lamb to be slain on the altar and then you have Saint John the Baptist, you have etc. things besides st. Joseph the Blessed Virgin herself But that the silence of our Lady of knock I think is a powerful testimony of her maternal presence simply, you know Her just maternal presence so no instructions handed out but a presence whereby to reaffirm the people of Ireland that she is close There's something similar going on at bed. No, soanneux. I don't know if you know Belgium. It's a country. There's like 11 million people there. It's divided into like two main parts,

but then there's a third. So some people speak Flemish, which is like Dutch. Some people speak French, and then some people speak German, very few, but some. In the French speaking part referred to as Wallonia, you have two apparition sites from the 1930s, Beaux Hains and Banneux. And I went to Banneux with some students

after having pitched in with a conference that they held there in the northern part of Belgium. And our lady identified herself as the mother of the poor and she asked as a simple sign of kind of deference or submission for the people who come to bathe, not like in the way that you bathe at Lourdes, but to wash their hands kind of. So come to the water. So there's some beautiful kind of baptismal imagery there and penitential imagery as well. And then the last one. This is just, this is my Switzerland experience. So there are lots of saints in Switzerland. So you have Samarites where you have members of the Theban Legion. Also there's a member of the Theban Legion

in Solothurn and some in Zurich. And then you have obviously these very famous monasteries like Einzigen or Dissensis or others besides. But one of the most holy sites in Switzerland, which people in Switzerland tend to agree upon as a holy site, is those associated with Saint Nicholas of Flü, who lived in the 15th century, was a married man, but received a call to see to the provision of his family, but to live separately from them as a hermit and who spent many, many days in close proximity to the place where he lived, the place where he was baptized and to the church where he was to worship in prayer and praying for peace and the unity of Switzerland said to have preserved them from war to a mediated conflict. And even like contemporary stories will say that Nicholas of Flux exercises

a kind of patronage in seeing to the pacific state, the serene state of Switzerland. So you can go to the place where he was baptized, to his little hermitage, to the little church, the place where he's buried, and then walk around this beautiful lake, Lake Saarinen, in central Switzerland in the canton of Obwalden. And I went there twice and I wasn't expecting the peace that kind of descended upon me in either of those instances, but I was super grateful for it. So St. Nicholas of Flume, pray for us. So that's my list, folks. If you're wondering if I can recap it, I will.

Medjugorje, Philadelphia, city of champions, city of saints. You got saints in New York, you got saints in Emmitsburg, you got saints in like Oklahoma City, you got saints in Carmel, you got saints all over in the United States, but other shrines besides. So look for a place near you. It might become a place of greater devotion. And then you got the big ticket ones.

So Santiago de Compostela, Rome, the Holy Land, Walsingham. I highlighted just Santiago de Compostela and Rome. And then in the Southeast of France, again, I'm just picking stuff that I've experienced. La Salette, La Saint-Bombe, Paralimonial and Anci. And then in the Southwest of France, Toulouse and Fonjot. But then that made me think of other cool Dominican sites, including but not limited to Bologna, Aquino, Rocaseasseca, Monte Cassino-Falcinova, and Cologne.

And then Big Marian shrines, we listed a few, several in fact, but you got Lourdes and Fatima there as not too far away, you know, Portugal and France. And then just some random ones that occurred to me, Nac, Berneux, and then the Flû des Rampes as it's called, the sites associated with Saint Nicholas the Flû. So I hope that feeds your holy imagination for a pilgrimage that you might take as a way by which to experience a depth of ongoing conversion, vocation, formation, as a way by which to heal and to grow as the Lord accompanies you on the way as you seek to arrive at him. Alright folks, know of my prayers for you, please pray for me. Wait before I sign off I should say the things. This is Pines with a Coindes, subscribe orama, push the bell, oh yeah.

Also check out God's Planning, we did an episode on Pilgrimage, which was like a billion years ago so the audio quality is probably trash, so don't listen to it, never mind, I take it all back. Okay, prayer time. Know of my prayers for you, please pray for me and I'll look forward to chatting with you next time on Pines with a Coindes.