The pilgrimages across Poland have begun. Every year in early August, from every corner of Poland, people set out on walking pilgrimages across the country to converge on Czestochowa, Mary’s national shrine, on August 15. It’s a multi-generational tradition. Parishes and local communities assemble and walk, usually 12-15 miles per day, en route to Jasna Gora (Bright Mountain). People along the way open their homes or farms to accommodate pilgrims simply. They pray and sing as they walk, culminating in a national assembly at Czestochowa on the Solemnity of the Assumption.

This is not the Middle Ages. This is not a lost chapter from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. It is tradition, alive and well, in the heart of 21st-century Europe. We’re told that these kinds of “folkways” were medieval, when people had lots of “festivals” to break up work. Go take a look at Poland today. We’re told we have to have showmanship and “rock stars” to bring the young to church. Young Polish people have been doing this for ages and it’s a rite of summer — a religious rite of summer whose annual occurrence serves to connect and reconnect them to the Church. The young people from my beloved Catholic University of Lublin (KUL) just set out this week. They have 200 miles ahead of them.

In case you wonder what it’s like, there’s a version in America. Every year for the last 38, a walking pilgrimage has set out from Ss. Peter and Paul Church in Great Meadows, New Jersey, bound for the National Shrine of Our Lady of Czestochowa in Doylestown, Pennsylvania. It was launched by a priest who used to be my parochial vicar, the late Fr. Ignatius Kuziemski, a former Redemptorist from Poland who became a Metuchen diocesan priest. For some reason, it’s early this year (August 7-10) but it gives you a flavor of Poland. More information can be found here.

Their legs will ache, their bodies will hurt. We don’t do much walking these days. But between the Transfiguration and the Assumption are nine days, a novena (more here) during which we might consider the bodies that God has given us for His praise. We start with the transfiguration of Christ’s Body and end with the taking of Mary, body and soul to heaven.

Human incarnation is very much under assault today, from those who deny that their bodily-ness has anything to do with their identity to ersatz versions of marriage (Our Lady warned in Fatima about the devil’s assault on marriage and family) to notions that “families” are any desired grouping to a baby just born 31 years after he was conceived (but left frozen in an IVF bank). The pilgrims walking to Czestochowa — in Poland and in America — are put very much in touch with their bodies, whose capacities and limits they raise to God’s praise.

There’s something to be said — physically and spiritually — about stretching one’s legs.