Guest Pilgrimage: Fr. Ryan Humphries’ Sabbatical 2018: The Camino and Other Sites in Europe

FATHER'S TALK:

From 2007 to 2010, recently-ordained Fr. Ryan Humphries was the Parochial Vicar (assistant pastor) for my parish, the then Church of the Immaculate Conception in Natchitoches, Louisiana. In 2013 he returned for what became a three-year stint as Rector of what by then was the Minor Basilica of the Immaculate Conception. I consider him my main spiritual adviser and a good friend.

June 2016

As Father explains at the beginning of this talk, in early 2018 he approached our recently installed Bishop for a two-week extension to his four weeks of vacation to allow him to make a pilgrimage along the Camino de Santiago and unexpectedly came away from that meeting with a four-month sabbatical (August-November) and quite expanded agenda of pilgrimages all over Europe. That was just the first of a series of unexpected developments from which he took a profound spiritual message.

On Sunday 24 February 2019, I received a text message from him letting me know that he would be in Natchitoches on Tuesday evening 26 February, giving a talk on his pilgrimage with pictures and lots of anecdotes, and asking me to “get the word out.” By the end of the exchange that ensued, I had created a title, a banner, and a Facebook Event for the talk – and had arranged to meet Fr. Ryan for beer at the local pub beforehand.

The Facebook Event got some traction, being shared well outside my own circle, including to someone lamenting that she could not drive up to Natchitoches from New Orleans for the talk and hoping that someone would record it. So I asked Father if it would be okay to do so,  suggesting that he just refer anyone wanting it to contact me but that I would not post it or anything. He responded to go ahead and post it, and offered his slideshow as well. And so was born the first-ever “guest post” to this little travel blog.

I am definitely an amateur at wedding audio to video, and although I am overall satisfied with the result I nonetheless apologize for what is objectively a rather crude job of editing. I thought I had the timings down, but when it compiled some parts had drifted a few seconds out of sync. (My apologies as well for my phone alarm going off near the end of Fr. Ryan’s talk! I was using the phone to capture the audio, so that comes through loud and clear. I didn’t expect the talk to go over an hour in length and forgot about that particular alarm setting.)

Kevin Shanahan of the Natchitoches Parish Journal attended the latter part of the talk, took pictures, and posted an article about Fr. Ryan’s adventures a couple of days later, which may be read here [LINK].

Here are a few more links to a few (by no means all) interesting items:

Santiago de Compostela [LINK]

• Legend of St. James [LINK]
• Camino [LINK]
• Botafumeiro [LINK]

National Art Museum of Catalonia [LINK]

The Viganò Testimony [LINK]

The Louisiana Window in Westminster Abbey: [LINK] [LINK]

Italy 2014: More Maps

Well, I kind of went map-happy this morning, and came up with four (!) more to illustrate the pilgrimage last month.  Here they are:

For general orientation, this puts north-central Italy into its overall context, with our final driving routes indicated.

Italy 2014 Day 04 – Thursday 23 October

I Pellegrini 
(Photo provided by Rick Johnson, taken by Alexis Darbonne)
(Larger at bottom with key)

[Well, from the lateness of this post you can see that my ambition of “live-blogging” this trip with daily updates ended up being a bust.  As I’ve mentioned already, one of the trade-offs of being part of a packaged trip like this and thus not having to worry about arrangements and so forth, just be where they said when they said – and this trip went off virtually flawlessly in that respect – is being on someone else’s schedule, and they drove us pretty hard.  It had to be that way, I understand, to get in all the things we wanted to do.  But by the end of each day mental as well as bodily weariness made it virtually impossible to think coherent thoughts much less compose an extended narrative.  A substantial three-course dinner, with wine, did not help the cause of blogging.  I did good to get notes jotted down in my pocket journal.  So I’m actually “back-writing” this – on the plane, just out of Rome, on the morning of Wednesday 29 October, just out of Italian air-space over the south of France!  Nevertheless, I’m going to write each day’s entry as if I were more timely … as I wanted to be!]

Italy 2014 Day 03 – Wednesday 22 October

The Cross from San Damiano,
currently in the Church of Saint Clare

Our wake-up call came at 06:30 to be ready for breakfast at 07:30 and departure from the lobby at 08:30.  Breakfast was meats, cheese, and bread, in addition to more American staples like scrambled eggs, bacon, and cereal.  Plus a coffee machine, juices, and fruits.  From the lobby we walked uphill (everything seems to be uphill in Assisi!) to the Basilica of St. Francis, the mother church of the Franciscan order.  (Virtual tours:  LINK)  

The Basilica of
San Francesco

Built into the side of a hill, the Basilica contains two churches – the Upper Church and the Lower Church – in addition to the real tomb of St. Francis in a crypt below.  Because of the danger the saint’s relics would be absconded with by a rival town (such as Assisi’s traditional enemy, Perugia), although the Lower Church was specifically built to house a magnificent shrine for St. Francis the actual relics were hidden below, and ultimately forgotten only to be rediscovered in the 19^th century!  [Thu 10/23 08:30 … I found I could not type on a moving bus…]  The three are literally stacked one atop the other!

We heard Mass in the Franciscan brothers’ chapel, also known as the "Peace Chapel," said this time by Fr. Ryan assisted by Fr. Chris – our first time ever hearing the Mass celebrating the new Feast of St. John Paul II the Great. 

The Franciscan Brothers' Chapel

Italy 2014 Day 02 – Tuesday 21 October

Assisi
[SOURCE]

We landed at the Rome airport – actually Leonardo da Vinci International Airport at Fiumicino, down on the coast near Ostia at the mouth of the Tiber River, ten or twelve miles from Rome itself – at about 07:10 local time.  By 08:40 we had finished passport control and claimed our baggage, and met our Italian “escort,” Debra – actually a British expatriate married to an Italian – who works with Magnificat Tours.  She had us on the bus and headed to our first destination, Assisi, the home of St. Francis, by 09:30.  Our bus-driver for the entire trip will be one Luigi.  We are a total of 46 pilgrims, mostly from Louisiana – Natchitoches with Fr. Ryan Humphries of the Minor Basilica of the Immaculate Conception; a group from Vacherie with his friend Fr. Chris Decker of Baton Rouge; and a few outliers from Lafayette, New Orleans, and even a father and son from Little Rock, Arkansas.  And Alexis, the representative from Magnificat.