National Catholic Register portal reports on the growing trend of “walking pilgrimages” organized by Modern Catholic Pilgrim, an apostolate founded by Will Peterson, featuring testimonials from participants who describe these walks as spiritually meaningful experiences connected to everyday life. The article presents pilgrimages as accessible, community-oriented activities focused on intentions, prayer, and family bonding, with destinations including shrines, churches, and even routes commemorating the only approved Marian apparition in the United States. What the article systematically conceals is that true Catholic pilgrimage is an act of penance and supplication to God through the intercession of the true saints — not a feel-good communal hike centered on subjective “intentions” and the veneration of dubious apparitions, all organized under the auspices of a conciliar sect that has emptied the faith of its supernatural substance.
The Reduction of Pilgrimage to Naturalistic Exercise
The article opens with Taylor Kelly’s testimony about a 5-mile walk between two parishes named after St. Joseph in Indiana, describing how she “can connect that to that moment of prayer and pilgrimage” and “incorporate pilgrimage into my daily life.” The language is revealing: pilgrimage is presented not as a solemn act of penance, a journey undertaken in mortification of the flesh and supplication to Almighty God, but as something “accessible” and “relatable to my everyday life.” This is the modernist method: take a sacred institution, strip it of its supernatural character, and repackage it as a self-help spiritual exercise.
The Catholic understanding of pilgrimage has always been rooted in penance, sacrifice, and intercession. The great pilgrimages of Christendom — to Jerusalem, Rome, Santiago de Compostela, Canterbury — were undertaken by the faithful who traveled often for weeks or months, enduring hardship, danger, and physical suffering, precisely because the journey itself was an act of mortification offered to God. The pilgrim sought not “connection” with everyday life but separation from it — a deliberate turning away from the comforts of the world toward the things of Heaven. As the Fathers of the Church taught, the Christian life is a pilgrimage (peregrinatio) through this valley of tears toward our true homeland. To reduce this to a 5-mile walk along a river with intentions for answered prayers is to drain the concept of all its theological substance.
The “Year of St. Joseph” and Conciliar Manufactured Devotions
The article notes that Will Peterson presented his idea to the Diocese of Fort Wayne-South Bend “three days before Pope Francis announced the Year of St. Joseph.” This providential coincidence is presented as a “Holy Spirit moment.” Let us be clear: the “Year of St. Joseph” was declared by Jorge Bergoglio — the usurper who occupied the chair of Peter — in December 2020. Whatever private devotions individual Catholics may have had to St. Joseph, the institutional declaration came from a man who, by the very fact of his manifest heresies and apostasies, had no authority to bind the faithful or to institute liturgical observances. As St. Robert Bellarmine teaches, a manifest heretic ceases to be Pope and head, just as he ceases to be a Christian and member of the body of the Church (De Romano Pontifice). The faithful owe no obedience to the decrees of an antipope, and no “Holy Spirit moment” can be read into the coincidence of a layman’s hiking initiative aligning with a heretic’s declaration.
Furthermore, the entire apparatus described — diocesan partnerships, parish coordination, institutional backing — operates within the structures of the conciliar sect. The Diocese of Fort Wayne-South Bend is part of the post-conciliar church, an organization that has systematically undermined the faith through ecumenism, religious liberty, the cult of man, and the replacement of the Most Holy Sacrifice with a Protestantized memorial meal. To seek spiritual nourishment from such structures is to drink from a poisoned well.
The “Walk to Mary” and the Champion Apparition
Perhaps the most egregious element in this article is the promotion of the “Walk to Mary” pilgrimage to the National Shrine of Our Lady of Champion in Champion, Wisconsin, which “commemorates the only approved Marian apparition in the United States.” The article describes a 22-mile walk, a companion 1.7-mile route for families and the elderly, and the participation of Kym Allex and her eight children, who “were praying for their future vocations” and “singing all different praises to Our Blessed Mother.”
The apparition at Champion (originally called “Our Lady of Good Help”) was allegedly experienced by Adele Brise in 1859. It was approved by Bishop David Ricken of Green Bay in 2010 — a bishop appointed by the conciliar apparatus, operating under the authority of antipopes. The approval of private revelations is an act of the ordinary magisterium that requires the authority of a true bishop in communion with the true Pope. A bishop appointed by Benedict XVI (Joseph Ratzinger, himself a manifest heretic who never validly held the papacy) and operating within the conciliar structures possesses no such authority. The approval is therefore null and void.
Moreover, the content and context of the Champion apparition bear the hallmarks of the same pattern observed in other false or suspicious apparitions: a message that is vague, centered on personal piety and prayer rather than the condemnation of heresy and the call to conversion, and an approval process controlled by the very structures that have emptied Catholic devotion of its supernatural content. The Allex family’s description of the pilgrimage — “praying for their future vocations,” “offering up our feet hurting,” “singing praises” — reveals a spirituality that is entirely horizontal, focused on personal intentions and family bonding rather than the adoration of God and the salvation of souls. This is not Catholic devotion; it is naturalistic sentimentalism dressed in religious vocabulary.
The Language of Modernist Spirituality
The article’s vocabulary is a textbook case of the modernist corruption of Catholic language. Consider the following phrases:
– “A powerful component of pilgrimage can be traveling with others” — reducing a sacred act to a social experience.
– “Set an intention” — the language of corporate retreats and self-help seminars, not of Catholic theology.
– “Accessible and just relatable to my everyday life” — the modernist imperative to make everything comfortable and convenient.
– “Spiritual tool that we have in the Church in our spirituality” — reducing the faith to a toolkit for personal enrichment.
– “Keep it simple” — the antithesis of the Catholic understanding of pilgrimage as demanding sacrifice and endurance.
The Capuchin “Father” Christopher Iwancio is quoted saying a pilgrimage “doesn’t have to be complicated” and that “people can just walk from their parish to the cathedral.” This is the language of a man who has abandoned the supernatural understanding of the faith. True Catholic pilgrimage is supposed to be demanding — that is precisely the point. The difficulty, the suffering, the separation from comfort — these are the very means by which the pilgrim participates in the Cross of Christ and merits grace. To “keep it simple” is to strip the act of its penitential character and reduce it to a pleasant stroll.
The Omission of the Supernatural
What is entirely absent from this article is any mention of the true purpose of Catholic pilgrimage: the obtaining of graces, the remission of sins, the fulfillment of vows, and the intercession of the saints for the salvation of souls. There is no mention of the state of grace as a prerequisite for fruitful pilgrimage. There is no mention of confession, of the Most Holy Sacrifice, of the necessity of true contrition. There is no mention of the reality of sin, of the danger of damnation, of the urgency of conversion.
Instead, we are offered “intentions,” “prayers that have been answered,” “blessings that Mary and Jesus give to my family,” and “tangible ways that faith can be moving in everyday life.” This is the spirituality of the conciliar sect: a vague, feel-good religiosity that never confronts the soul with the terrifying reality of God’s justice or the necessity of supernatural faith. It is, in the words of St. Pius X, the spirit of Modernism — “the synthesis of all heresies” — which reduces religion to subjective experience and social action.
The Eucharistic Pilgrimage Connection
The article mentions that “Father” Iwancio served as chaplain on the 2024 and 2025 National Eucharistic Pilgrimages. These pilgrimages were organized by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops — the institutional arm of the conciliar sect in America. The “Eucharist” venerated in these pilgrimages is the product of the post-conciliar reform, which replaced the true transubstantiation with a symbolic memorial. To serve as chaplain for such an event is to lend sacral legitimacy to a counterfeit sacrament. The faithful are warned: participation in these “Eucharistic” events is not communion with Christ but participation in a rite that has been emptied of its sacrificial character and reduced to a communal meal.
The Testimony of the Allex Family
Kym Allex’s testimony is presented as the emotional climax of the article: “It means so much to know and see the blessings that Mary and Jesus give to my family… We are blessed to know a spiritual Mother in heaven who is a role model of pure generosity, unwavering love and commitment to family.” This language is indistinguishable from the sentimental piety of Protestant devotional literature. Where is the language of substitutionary satisfaction, of merit, of the communion of saints as a supernatural reality? Where is the acknowledgment that Our Blessed Mother is the Mediatrix of All Graces, the Co-Redemptrix whose intercession is necessary not for “family bonding” but for the salvation of souls from eternal damnation?
The Allex family’s practice of making pilgrimages to “local churches, shrines or other holy sites” on family vacations reveals the ultimate reduction of sacred devotion to a leisure activity — a spiritual tourism that treats holy places as destinations for edification rather than as sites of supernatural encounter and penitential sacrifice.
Conclusion: The Counterfeit Spirituality of the Conciliar Sect
What this article describes is not Catholic pilgrimage. It is a counterfeit — a naturalistic imitation that retains the external forms while emptying them of supernatural content. The true Catholic pilgrimage demands: a state of grace, true contrition, confession, the intention of satisfying Divine Justice, the intercession of the true saints (not those “canonized” by antipopes), and the offering of genuine physical and spiritual suffering to God. It demands separation from the world, not integration with “everyday life.” It demands the recognition that we are peregrini — strangers and exiles on earth — not comfortable residents seeking “accessible” spiritual experiences.
The faithful who desire true pilgrimage must reject the structures of the conciliar sect, seek out true priests in communion with the integral Catholic faith, and undertake their journeys not to shrines approved by heretical bishops but to the true holy places of Christendom — the tombs of the apostles, the sites of authentic martyrdoms, the churches where the true Mass is still offered. Only then will their pilgrimages be acts of true devotion, meritorious before God, and conducive to the salvation of their souls.
Source:
Pilgrimages Are Also Made for Walking (ncregister.com)
Date: 14.06.2026