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 Map of Pilgrimage Sites in Rome

Here is a map I just made to illustrate where the various places we saw in Rome are located.  "Pilgrimage sites" does not, of course, mean that they are all religious in nature.  They are just the various major locations that we went in Rome while on the Pilgrimage.  At some time in the near future I will go back and link and key those last three days (Sunday through Tuesday) so readers can easily jump to the map if they want. 

A.     Hotel Cicerone

B.     St. Mary Major

C.     The Vatican City, St. Peter’s Basilica and Square, Vatican Museums

D.    The Catacombs of St. Calixtus

E.     The Pantheon

F.     Piazza Navona

G.    St. Paul Outside the Walls

H.    St. John Lateran

I.       The Trevi Fountain

J.      The Colosseum

K.     St. Peter in Chains

Source of Original:  http://www.planetware.com/tourist-attractions-/rome-i-la-r.htm, accessed 21 November 2014

Italy 2014 Day 09 – Tuesday 28 October

The Basilica of St. John Lateran

Our last full day in Rome – and it was full – began with a relatively late wake-up at 07:00, 08:00 breakfast, to be met by Roberta in the lobby, thence immediately onto the bus for the drive to St. John Lateran, the last of the four Major Basilicas of Rome we would visit on our pilgrimage [LINK].  It is the oldest of the Basilicas, the first in rank (thus formally called the “Archbasilica of St. John Lateran”), indeed, the oldest surviving church in the West.  It, moreover – not St. Peter’s – serves as the Pope’s cathedral in his capacity as Bishop of Rome.

Constantine the Great

The Basilica as a church building goes back to the very time of the first Christian Roman Emperor Constantine the Great in the early 4^th century, when it was given by him to the Pope – but it is in fact much more ancient than that, being part of the complex making up the extensive Palace of the Lateran branch of the Sextian family, one of the more ancient families in Rome.  (Among the early notables was Lucius Sextius Lateranus of Licinian-Sextian Law fame and first plebeian Consul in the 4^th century BC).  Constantine had inherited the Lateran Palace by marriage, but from the early 4^th century AD it would serve as the usual Papal residence through most of the Middle Ages, undergoing the usual periodic restorations after fires or earthquakes, such as in the 10^th century, before being magnificently embellished by Pope Innocent III in the early 13^th century.  There, of course, in 1215, Innocent would preside over one of the four most important Ecumenical Councils in the history of the Church, Lateran IV.  Then an extended period of vacancy in the 14^th century during the Avignon Papacy (1305-1378) would leave it in near ruins to be rebuilt yet again.  The Basilica also suffered during that period, to be rebuilt and embellished over the course of centuries once the Popes had returned to Rome.  The modern façade was designed by Allessandro Galilei (related to Galileo, but a century later), “remov[ing] all vestiges of the ancient basilica architecture, and impart[ing] a new-classical façade” [op. cit.].  Nevertheless, some elements of the most ancient structures were preserved throughout, including the Scala Sancta … but we’ll get to that.

Italy 2014 Day 08 – Monday 27 October

Traditional Latin Mass in St. Peter's Basilica
(Picture by Ashley Hebert)

The wake-up call came early today – 05:30, for 06:30 breakfast and 07:15 bus departure for the Vatican City, the temporal center of the Holy Roman Catholic Church.  The Vatican is kind of like Florence – where to start?  Well, here’s the gist:  Vatican City is a walled, independent city-state completely surrounded by the city of Rome.  It comprises an area of about 110 acres, with a population under a thousand, ruled by the Pope.  It’s located on the right side of the Tiber River, across the river from the Seven Hills of Ancient Rome, on the Vatican Hill and surrounding once-marshy fields abutting the Janiculum Hill.  This walled area is all that’s left of over a thousand years when the Popes were temporal as well as spiritual leaders in central Italy, much of which comprised the Papal States.  In 1861, all of Italy save Rome was united by the King of Sardinia into the modern Kingdom of Italy; the Popes lost all except the city itself.  Then, as a result of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, France withdrew its troops which had been protecting Rome’s independence, and the Popes lost Rome.  They withdrew within the walls of the Vatican, not to emerge for almost sixty years, until the 1929 Lateran Treaty between Pope Pius XI and Benito Mussolini secured the status of the Vatican as an independent state.  St. Peter’s Basilica, the most important of the four Major Basilicas of Rome, fronted by the great Square with the sweeping colonnades, is only a small part of the complex, which contains much more – residences for the functionaries of the Holy See, offices, chapels, museums, libraries, gardens – only a fraction of which were we able to see in our day there.

Italy 2014 Day 06 – Saturday 25 October

Last view of Florence

Wake-up was slightly later – 06:30 – with our bags to be out in the hallway for 07:30, the same time as breakfast.  

Chapel of the Blessed
Sacrament, Church of
Santa Maria Novella

At 08:30, we walked from the hotel to the nearby church of Santa Maria Novella, where Fr. Chris said Mass in the Chapel of the Blessed Sacrament. 

The Uffizi Gallery

Isabella met up with us again afterward, and we walked to the Uffizi Gallery just off the Piazza della Signoria [LINK].  What was built in the 16^th century to be offices (Uffizi) for Florentine city officials very early became a show-house for artistic treasures accumulated by the Medici family who dominated those offices and which were ultimately bequeathed to the city by the last Medici heiress in the 17^th century.  Our group of 46 then split up into two smaller groups to tour the repository of some of the most famous paintings and statues in the world [Virtual tour:  LINK].  We followed Isabella.  Once again, a couple of hours was not nearly enough time.  It was downright frustrating, in fact, the one constant albeit inevitable aspect of this journey.  Anne and I took far too many pictures to incorporate even a fraction here; I will post a number at the bottom of this entry.

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.