Gender, Nation and Religion in European Pilgrimage

Catrien Notermans, Willy Jansen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781409449645
• eBook ISBN: 9781317129967
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Despite the forces of secularization in Europe, old pilgrimage routes are attracting huge numbers of people and given new meanings in the process. In pilgrimage, religious or spiritual meanings are interwoven with social, cultural and politico-strategic concerns. This book explores three such concerns under intense debate in Europe: gender and sexual emancipation, (trans)national identities in the context of migration, and European unification and religious identifications in a changing religious landscape. The interdisciplinary contributions to this book explore a range of such controversies and issues including: Africans renewing family ties at Lourdes, Swedish women at midlife or young English men testing their strength on the Camino to Santiago de Compostela, New Age pilgrims and sexuality, Saints' festivals in Spain and Brittany, conservative Catholics challenging Europe's liberal policies on abortion, Polish migrants and French Algerians reconfiguring their transnational identity by transporting their familiar Madonna to their new home, new sacred spaces created such as the shrine of Our Lady of Santa Cruz, traditional Christian saints such as Mary Magdalene given new meanings as new age goddess, and foundation legends of shrines revived by new visionaries. Pilgrimage sites function as nodes in intersecting networks of religious discourses, geographical routes and political preoccupations, which become stages for playing out the boundaries between home and abroad, Muslims and Christians, pilgrimage and tourism, Europe and the world. This book shows how the old routes of Europe are offering inspirational opportunities for making new journeys.

Chapter 1
Old Routes, New Journeys: Reshaping Gender, Nation and Religion in European Pilgrimage

Willy Jansen

In present-day Europe pilgrimage is flourishing, despite trends of secularization and a notable decline in church attendance. Journeys to sacred places for religious and other purposes have a long, if sometimes marginalized, history, but now such journeys are taking centre stage, attracting new groups and new meanings. The continued and at times expanding pilgrimages across Europe are part of a revival of pilgrimage in general as noted by several scholars and journalists (Coleman and Eade 2004, Crumrine and Morinis 1991, Derks 2009, Dubisch and Winkelman 2005, Eade and Sallnow 1991, Hermkens, Jansen and Notermans 2009, Morinis 1992, Reader 2007, Turner and Turner 1978). Each year nearly 300 million people worldwide make religiously inspired travels equivalent to a trade volume of €13 billion (National Geographic 2011). Such travel would include Mecca for Muslims, the Kumbh Melafestival for Hindus, or the Shikoku Pilgrimage for Buddhists. The focus of this book, however, is pilgrimage as part of changing structures of society in Europe.

Developments in mass tourism and infrastructure, open borders, the euro, ecological concerns or body and health trends are changing the personal and collective experience of pilgrimage. Literature, too, such as the novels of Paulo Coelho (1987/1995), Dan Brown (2003) and others, is inspiring the exploration of old or new spiritual sites. Meanwhile new media and technologies have made it possible to share one’s personal pilgrimage experience with millions of others via websites or blogs or to undertake virtual pilgrimages, complete with videos of the rituals and the ability to post messages to saints or to light a candle. Those in search of alternative spiritual experiences are attracted to spaces such as Glastonbury in the UK, which have become action areas for social groups or political movements (Bowman 2008). Journalistic interest is also reviving, resulting in documentaries such as Ave Maria (2006) by Dutch filmmaker Nouchka van Brakel and films such as Lourdes (2009) by Austrian Jessica Hausner or The Way (2010) by Emilio Estevez. Students and scholars are also participating in this revival: 7 per cent of pilgrims to Santiago state their interest is ethnographic compared to 18 per cent who cite religious motivation (Lois González and Somoza Medina 2010).

Lourdes, Santiago de Compostela and Częstochowa are all impressive meeting points where huge numbers of Europeans from all backgrounds come together to enact their lived religion, but they also function as crossroads of transnationalism and cosmopolitanism, where networks of religious discourses, geographical routes and political preoccupations intersect. The question then arises: what is the sociocultural and politico-strategic meaning of contemporary pilgrimage as expressed at various European Christian pilgrimage sites? This collection answers this important question by engaging three hotly debated issues: the reshaping of sociocultural core values regarding gender and sexuality, the contesting and reformulation of national and other geographical identities, and the shifting religious landscape. We examine how, through pilgrimage, these three crucial sociopolitical issues in contemporary Europe are being discussed, expressed, contested or renewed; we analyze the nature of the social order construed by different stakeholders, and whether this reaffirms or challenges dominant patterns; and we ask how these different positions interact. By so doing, we aim to show that the reconfiguration of gender, nation and religion are crucial elements in the re-emergence of religion as a social force in Europe.

Europe, Religion and Pilgrimage

The first steps on the road to the European Union (EU) were taken with the announcement of the Schuman Plan on 9 May 1950. A driving force behind the plan was Jean Monnet, the chair of the French delegation to negotiate the plan, and later the first chair of the Coal and Steel Union. Monnet’s ideal for Europe went beyond securing an agreement on coal and steel production. He wanted lasting peace, to curb the conflicts that had brought Europe twice into war, and to turn national interests into shared European concerns; thus his insistence that peace is a process that requires continuous attention. A transnational European identity, the precondition for lasting peace, would need constant work. It would have to be fed, defended and renewed. Europe is ‘a product of political demand rather than social contingency’ (Berezin and Schain 2003: 16), a community imagined by politicians rather than by its populations, as the contra-Europe votes in Ireland, England, Netherlands and France or the 2012 euro crisis have shown. But to create an enduring sense of transnational community and overcome the memories of war and conflict, points of shared history would have to be sought or invented (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983).

Paradoxically, considering Europe’s level of secularism, it was Christian heritage that came to serve this function, in particular, the opposition to Islam. Sameness and shared identity were sought in Europe’s religious, material, geographical, ethical and ritual heritage (Margry 2008), and while religion was not the sole element used to forge a pan-European identity, nevertheless the shared religious cultural heritage and in particular the network of traditional pilgrimage routes and shrines provided a host of useful identity markers. In addition, from a purely analytical perspective, the inclusion of religion provided an alternative approach to international relations (Katzenstein and Byrnes 2006: 680).

A telling example of the use of religious symbolism in constructing this new European identity, and its contestation by other groups, is the discussion of the European flag. The circle of 12 gold stars on a light blue background, according to some Catholic protagonists, is traditional Marian symbolism: heavenly blue is the colour of Mary, while the 12 stars refer to the biblical Apocalypse (Book of Revelations 12: 1): ‘After that there appeared a great sign in heaven, a woman robed with the sun, beneath her feet the moon, and on her head a crown of twelve stars.’ The designer of the flag, Marian devotee Arsène Heitz, once said that he had indeed been inspired by the image of Mary in the Rue du Bac in Paris where the Virgin Mary appeared to Catherine Labouré in 1830. In this image, Mary’s head is circled by 12 stars. The Miraculous Medal commemorating this event, in circulation all over the world, is emblazoned with the same circle of 12 stars. Indeed, the halo of stars reappears on the euro coin of the Vatican and on or near Marian images connected in name with Europe, such as the statue of Our Beloved Lady, Ruler of Europe, erected in 1958 on Mount Serenissima, Italy, and the Madonna of Strasbourg in the large stained-glass window designed by Max Ingrand, the ‘Window of Europe’, in the cathedral of Strasbourg, the city that, together with Brussels, is the seat of the European parliament. Iconography that identifies Europe with Mary is recurring in several key sites. ‘In 1996, Pope John Paul II designated the shrine of Our Lady of Europe (set up in Gibraltar in 1309 by King Ferdinand IV of Spain) as a “potent symbol” for the unification of Europe and “a place where, under the patronage of Mary, the human family will be drawn ever more closely into fraternal unity and peaceful coexistence”’ (Winnail 2003: 28). In the new chapel dedicated to Mary, Mother of Europe, in Gnadenweiler, Germany, the number 12 is repeated in the beams, in decorative structures, in 12 flags (referring to those countries associated with the site) and in the European flag. Internet discussions of the Marian link with the flag are debunked by some as a myth, while others advocate for a flag untainted by connections, presumed or not, to a specific religious group. The secular explanation of the flag’s imagery is that the stars symbolize the peoples of Europe, but 12 is also a numerical symbol of cosmic order, as in 12 hours on a clock or 12 months of the year; indeed, the number 12 stands for perfection, plenitude or completion, just as the circle represents union. The 12 stars do not correspond to the number of countries in the European Union, and the entry of new member states into the European Union has no impact on the number of stars on the flag. Regardless of these diverse claims and perspectives, the notion that the European flag is a Catholic symbol is officially denied for political reasons, and in 2003 it was decided that no reference to God or Christianity should be made in the European Constitution.

Regardless of the European Union’s official secular stance, Christian values continue to be forwarded as elements of its cultural heritage that could unite old and potentially new European countries. The Christian Democratic parties that initiated the EU pointed out: ‘Pope John Paul II has made it a personal … “crusade” to persuade Europe to acknowledge its debt to Christianity by referring in the constitution to Europe’s Christian heritage as a source of the values that unite the continent’ (Nelsen and Guth 2003: 2). This has led some to speak of Europe as the result of ‘a Catholic conspiracy of conservatives’ and to see the EU as divided along confessional lines, with Catholics supporting, and Protestants rejecting, the Integration Project (Katzenstein and Byrnes 2006: 682).

The actual situation is more complex. In fact, Catholics and Protestants are divided internally about the issue. Catholics do not necessarily conceive of themselves as Europeans because of a shared religious identity, and some conservative Catholics oppose the EU project altogether, because they see new European laws as moral degeneration and symptomatic of the EU being an anti-Christian dictatorship (Samson, Jansen and Notermans 2011, Samson, this volume). These groups make reference to religion to contest, not support, the evolving European identity. Furthermore, most Europeans identify themselves as secular. The idea of Europe as secular, however, needs clarification. It does not necessarily mean that the so-called secularization theory is valid (see Berger, Davie and Fokas 2008). According to Dungaciu (2004) the notion of a strictly secular Europe was developed within a Western European framework in which modernization was equated with the disappearance of religion from the public domain, and the relegation of religious activities to the private sphere. In this view, modernization was incompatible with religion. Only later was it realized that Western European secularization was not the standard but the exception. Davie (2000, 2001a, 2001b), for instance, argues that, compared to America, Western Europe shows ‘relatively low levels of religious activity and institutional commitment’ (2001a: 270). Furthermore, European secularization was less general and stable than had been suggested: descriptions of religious patterns, for instance, left out religious activities in Central and Eastern Europe as well as data indicating continued or alternative forms of religiosity (Dungaciu 2004: 4). By focusing strictly on church membership or participation and by adhering to narrowly prescribed definitions of religion, many other spiritual searches or practices were routinely excluded from or overlooked in the social study of religion. Nevertheless, Europe’s atypical pattern of religion and its self-perception as secular remain important aspects of contemporary European identity (Davie 2001a: 273).

Whatever European religious self-perception, there is a pervasive religious memory materialized in innumerable sacred sites that dot Europe’s varied landscape, a sacred topography that provides a transnational religious tradition of connecting people and nations (Katzenstein and Byrnes 2006: 679, Faltin and Wright 2007: 1). By moving as pilgrims across the European landscape and performing various rituals together, pilgrims enact basic spatial and moral connectedness and actively contribute to ‘the development of transnational networks’ and ‘cosmopolitan sociability’ (Halemba 2011). Just so, route metaphors figure in the search for one’s roots and in the rewriting of the personal or collective self (Basu 2004). Not surprisingly, then, as Margry points out, European heritage creation emerged around significant pilgrimage routes, in particular the Camino to Santiago (2008: 17), which the Council of Europe declared a ‘European Cultural Itinerary’ in 1987, making it a de facto symbol of European unity. This case alone underscores the fact that pilgrimages, sacred places and structures are not just memorials to Europe’s past but cornerstones in the construction of its future. People who visit pilgrimage sites, whether profound believers or agnostic tourists, eco-wanderers or concerned religious conservatives, all contribute to the collective memory of a place and thus participate in the construction of particular identities within this European context. The synchronic action of the pilgrimage ritual is thus a multi-tool: its repetitiveness and use of traditional images and practices link pilgrims to the past while remaining an active factor in social change and in creating a means by which the identification of people takes place (Mach 1993: 90). Together, pilgrims lay out the ‘moral geography’ of Europe (Taylor 2007). Not only do political leaders borrow freely from the symbols, routes or values in Europe’s Christian cultural heritage, so too do all those who come together at these international junctions to express, transmit, accept or challenge ideas on gender, (supra)nation and religion.

Approach and Central Concepts

Following the practical turn in anthropology, the focus of this book is on ‘lived religion’, on what people actually believe and do, and on how this constitutes various identities. Consequently, we abstain from defining religion but rather invite our respondents to formulate their own ideas about pilgrimage. In our studies we have encountered non-believing tourists who light candles for a saint, Muslims who invite Christian pilgrims to eat in their mosque, and women who bring their menstrual blood to a Catholic altar in a cave. We describe such cases to show the wide variety of pilgrims and of meanings and motivations for religious practices without making any judgements as to whether these visitors are ‘real’ pilgrims, or whether menstrual rituals performed for Mother Earth are ‘real’ religious practices. Whether such practices conform to orthodox or conventional notions of religion are immaterial to our enquiry, as are theological distinctions between Church-approved and folk beliefs. If anything, the case studies in this volume show that all such practices closely overlap, and that there is a great deal of disagreement and negotiation about what constitutes proper practices and interpretations (Bax 1995, Eade and Sallnow 1991). This focus on lived religion also means we can work from in-depth descriptions of a few examples that reveal how iconic the pilgrimage idiom is with respect to gender, nation or religion, rather than strive for a systematic overview of all European sites or a systematic count of the changing numbers of pilgrims over time (for such studies see Nolan 1983, Nolan and Nolan 1989, Margry and Caspers 1997–2004, or the statistical work done by the Pilgrim’s Office in Santiago de Compostela).

Another concept relevant to the discussion of framing identities through religious discourse is that of ‘performativity’. Judith Butler’s concept of the performativity of gender, by which narratives, gestures, movements and images not merely express but constitute gender identity, suggests that identity is continuously created and recreated or ‘done’. By way of analogy, the same can be said for geographical or religious identities, which, in the case of pilgrimages, may be interpreted as sets of acts, movements, images, narratives and material artefacts by which identities are constituted. In other words, by undertaking pilgrimage, travellers also ‘do’ gender, nationality and spirituality in the sense that meaning is produced and identities are lived out as intrinsic parts of the journey. Meaning, then, is constituted at the moment of production and is not pre-existent. In Butler’s own words: ‘So what I’m trying to do is think about performativity as that aspect of discourse that has the capacity to produce what it names’ (Butler 1994, italics in original). Moreover, ‘identities are discursively created through citational practice’, through ‘regulated processes of repetition’ (Butler 1990: 145). Pilgrimages are exactly such processes of repetition. When the co-editor of this volume, Catrien Notermans, took her young daughters with her to Lourdes during fieldwork, she discovered them immediately copying the praying poses of visiting adults, and asking for baptism. Long-distance walkers to Santiago take the same paths as those of their predecessors in the Middle Ages, add their little stone to the piles along the road, offer money to feed the pilgrims coming after them, admire the same artworks, and often end their journey by putting their arms around the neck of the saint (Peelen and Jansen 2007); through such citational practices the walkers assume the identity of pilgrim, become pilgrim. This is true regardless of whether or not one is conventionally religious. Throughout our fieldwork we often heard the claim, ‘I am not a believer, but when you are there it does something to you.’ What this ‘something’ was could hardly be defined. Yet this is not to say that the repetition is unilinear, that the modern pilgrim is devoid of agency to change the meaning of the old routes. As Vasterling says, ‘the possibility of agency is consistently, and correctly, located in the process of reiteration: recitations can be resignifications’ (1999: 28). This collection is designed specifically to offer richly varied examples of how modern pilgrims creatively resignify what is repeated, thereby recycling, and renewing, cultural heritage for their own purposes.

Pilgrimage, thou...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures and Photographs
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Old Routes, New Journeys: Reshaping Gender, Nation and Religion in European Pilgrimage
• 2 Interconnected and Gendered Mobilities: African Migrants on Pilgrimage to Our Lady of Lourdes in France
• 3 Big, Strong and Happy: Reimagining Femininity on the Way to Compostela
• 4 Gender, Sexuality and Religious Critique among Mary Magdalene Pilgrims in Southern France
• 5 EU Criticism in Two Transnational Marian Anti-abortion Movements
• 6 The Miraculous Medal: Linking People Together Like the Beads of the Rosary
• 7 Pilgrim/Place
• 8 Producers of Meaning and the Ethics of Movement: Religion, Consumerism and Gender on the Road to Compostela
• 9 Pardons, Pilgrimage and the (Re-)construction of Identities in Brittany
• 10 Home and Away in an Increasingly Multicultural Britain: Pilgrimage, Parish and Polish Migration
• 11 Festivals of Moors and Christians: Replaying the Religious Frontier in Andalusia, Spain
• 12 The Virgin Mary, the Sanctuary and the Mosque: Interfaith Coexistence at a Pilgrimage Centre
• 13 Epilogue: Pilgrimage, Moral Geography and Contemporary Religion in the West 209
• Index