Alfred Regnery - Unlikely Pilgrim: A Journey into History and Faith

UNLIKELY PILGRIM

Copyright 2019 by Alfred Regnery

FIRST EDITION

ISBN 9780825308871

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Regnery, Alfred S., 1942- author.

Title: Unlikely pilgrim / by Alfred S. Regnery.

Description: First edition. | New York, NY : Beaufort Books, [2019]

Identifiers: LCCN 2018045112 | ISBN 9780825308871 (hardcover : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Christian pilgrims and pilgrimages. | Regnery, Alfred S., 1942---Travel.

Classification: LCC BV5067 .R44 2019 | DDC 263/.041--dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018045112

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Cover Photograph by Jose Carlos Macouzet Espinosa

To Audrey, with much love.

The Author walking in Italy

OVER THE COURSE OF SOME TWENTY YEARS, a friend and I took eleven pilgrimages to the Balkans, Western and Eastern Europe, and the Middle East. This is the story of those trips. Each was relatively unplanned; most involved physically challenging travel, often along paths American tourists rarely tread. We did not set out to take a series of pilgrimages. Rather, we first took one trip together, to Mount Athos in Greece, and then another and another until it became clear that all these journeys together added up to what could be called pilgrimages.

The inspiration for choosing our destinations would develop from something in the news or a book one of us was reading, or even a chance conversation with somebody who had been there. We would do some research, reading about the location and exchanging thoughts on it. We would get a history or guidebook about the place and off we would go, usually on the fly, with little more than a reservation for the first night. But as it turned out, these series of pilgrimages made up an almost seamless web of travel into places that at first sight would appear to be disconnected but which in fact had significant historical and religious associations. The end result was a journey into the history of Christianity and Western civilization, and into the faith that emanated from them.

And what history and faith we encountered! We stayed in 1500-year-old monasteries, walked on Roman roads where St. Paul and his entourage had trod, biked on mountain trails in post-communist Eastern Europe, and followed paths millions of medieval pilgrims had trekked to the great pilgrimage destinations of Christendom. We rarely knew where we would sleep or find our next meal, but we always found a bed, and never without finding a good meal first. We had long and engrossing conversations with monks, with peasants, with scholars, with artists, and ordinary people we met along the wayand with each other.

We walked hundreds of miles and bicycled thousands. We rode in horse-drawn farm wagons and behind tractors. We hitchhiked, we took trains, boats, and buses and we walked some more, and some more. We got lost, found our way, got lost again. Blisters, cuts and bruises, pulled muscles and shin splints, bug bites and wasp stings were constants, but despite busy and dangerous roads, steep trails, shady characters and questionable-looking cheap hotels, we experienced no permanent injuries or even really bad experiences.

I could probably be called a Washington insider and, by some, even a D.C. swamp dweller. I have spent nearly forty years living in and around the capital city, worked in the highest levels of the federal government, participated in meetings and negotiations with national and international leaders, and have been invited to the best parties, dinners, and embassies. I have known political and business leaders of every stripe. I have appeared and written for many of the nations leading media outlets, have published hundreds of books and as many bestsellers as about anybody in the publishing industry, and written a couple in addition to this one. But in many ways, these pilgrimages and the places I have visited have outshined all of those fancy people and places and made most seem insignificant in comparison.

Nick, my travelling companion, who wishes to remain at least partially anonymous, has had a different career, but one just as varied, as interesting, and as sophisticatedmaybe more so; his path was in academia and in the diplomatic world, in government, and in ecclesiastical circles in the U.S., in Great Britain and around the world. As we travelled, we had an ongoing, never-ending conversation about our mutual experiences and impressions of the worldalways interesting, always friendly, and always somehow related to where we were, who we saw, and what we were experiencing at the moment. A few of those conversations are repeated in this book, but most are not.

What we saw and learned on these trips almost boggles the mind. Nick and I are both well-educated and well-read, and before these trips we both knew a good deal about Greece and Rome, about medieval times, about the development of culture and religion throughout history, and about Europe, the Balkans and the Middle East. And we had both travelled extensively. And yet, despite our book knowledge and prior globetrotting, to actually visit places that we had only read aboutand plenty that we had notto talk to hundreds of people, to stay in their houses, monasteries, old castles and both luxurious and cheap hotels and hostels, provided an incomparable lesson of faith, of history, of culture and even of current affairs and politics and of the people responsible for it.

Paramount among the discoveries we made on these pilgrimages is the recognition that Christianity and Western Civilization are inalterably intertwined. Oh, we both knew that long before we embarked on these pilgrimages. But that recognition was solidified again and again, virtually everywhere we went, whether we were looking for Christian sites or not. Everywhere we went we found evidence of the Christian world, whether from the earliest days of the Church, from medieval times, or from the turmoil of the twentieth century. We visited the oldest surviving Christian church in the world, went to villages in Syria where the people still speak Aramaic, the language spoken by Christ. We sat in ruins of Roman buildings where St. Paul had established the first church in Europe. We visited the remains of the Seven Churches in Turkey to which St. John the Evangelist wrote letters which appear at the beginning of the Book of Revelation. We sat on a stone wall overlooking the site where the Emperor Constantine oversaw the hammering out of the Nicene Creedthe negotiation that saved the Roman Empire, for awhile at least, which established once and for all that Jesus Christ was God, and which resulted in Christianity being adopted lock, stock, and barrel by the Romans. We saw dozensperhaps hundredsof Greek and Roman ruins, some from hundreds of years B.C., others from the time of Christ or afterwards. These ancient architectural remains still showed the massive strength and prowess of Greco-Roman culture and empire, which was eventually conquered by an idea, a set of principles, a religion. We saw remnants of the Middle Ages from all sorts of perspectivesfrom the monasteries in half a dozen countries, to the pilgrim trails winding their way through Western Europe to Rome and to Santiago de Compostela. It was eye-opening to walk along those pathways once trod upon by millions of medieval pilgrims and imagine that we were, ourselves, there to do penance in the fourteenth century.