Nocturnal pilgrims walk 22km for Faith

By David Chua
MINUTES before midnight, on Saturday, 19 February, 12 pilgrims joined me for Perth’s first Pilgrimage of Reparation, a 22km all-night pilgrimage from St Bernadette’s Church, Glendalough, to St Anne’s Church, Belmont.

On the road: The dozen or so pilgrims, led by Daniel Mathys holding the crucifix, descend Jacob’s ladder at King’s Park on their nighttime walk from St Bernadette’s in Glendalough to St Anne’s in Belmont in the early hours of 19 February. A short time later they pass beneath the Mitchell Freeway, heading for the Narrows bridge and the South Perth foreshore. Photo: Nigel Cornelius

The pilgrimage began at 11.15pm with Mass at St Bernadette’s, offered by Fr Doug Harris, after which we processed around Lake Monger, along the Mitchell Freeway and King’s Park, over the Narrows Bridge and across the South Perth foreshore.
During our trip we paused by the churches of St Michael the Archangel, Leederville, St Joseph’s, Subiaco, and St Columba’s, South Perth, providing us with the opportunity to adore Our Lord and make spiritual communion from the roadside.
Our night was filled with prayer, hymns, and penance, all offered in reparation for the sins of the world.
Walking pilgrimages have long been a venerable part of Catholic tradition, and we sought to enter into that tradition by praying traditional hymns, devotions and litanies to the saints, Our Lady, and the Sacred Heart of Jesus, as well as hymns by St Thomas Aquinas and Gerard Manley Hopkins, the great English Jesuit and poet.
Our pilgrimage concluded at St Anne’s, Belmont, where Fr Michael Rowe gave us a final blessing, Reconciliation, and celebrated a solemn high Mass in the Extraordinary Form, with a choir formed by the pilgrims themselves.
Preparing a spirit of self-denial and penitence is the underlying message of the pre-Lenten season, which began on the same day as the pilgrimage.
Although the pilgrimage was arduous, leaving us exhausted by the final Mass on Sunday morning, I am thankful that it allowed us to enter the pre-Lenten season with a strong awareness of the need for self-denial and the upholding of the spirit over the flesh.
As the name suggests, reparation is the act of ‘repairing’ the damage done by sin, where we enter into and share in the suffering of Christ.
By doing so, we repair our own sins against Him as well as the sins of others, in the same way St Paul describes: “I rejoice in my suffering for your sake, and in my flesh I complete what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of His body, that is, the Church…” (Col 1:24).