National Pilgrimage 2025 Reflections: Joshua Scott

Joshua Scott (Fidelium member)

Ave Sanctissima, Ave Purissima! Last year, I watched parts of the National Pilgrimage from my smartphone, but this year I had the great privilege of becoming an in-person pilgrim. Though several days have passed, in a very many ways, my heart and mind have remained in England’s Nazareth.

A great many dimensions came together to give a feeling of a fullness of faith – something which I think can be expressed by the word ‘communion’. Celebrating the Mass and receiving Holy Communion in the Abbey grounds was a very special experience. Every Mass is a joyful acceptance of Christ’s perpetual invitation to the New Covenant, through which, amongst other things, we are reminded of what it really means to be Christians in fellowship with God, and with one another. Yet, there was something viscerally transcendental in the proclamatory nature of the open-air Mass in the natural theatre that is the Abbey.  Something that I think goes underappreciated in twenty-first century Christendom is the importance of the public profession of the Faith. Whether it be through a ‘public’ Mass or procession, there is something particular that binds us together in communion with God and with each other through this public proclamation, lacking shyness and embracing the inherent boldness of our Christianity.

Saying the Rosary with my brothers and sisters in Christ as we trod through those tiny streets, I knew that we were being filled with God’s grace, and letting it overflow into the secular space – a form of catholic evangelism. Indeed, there was a real sense of communion felt through the camaraderie between the hundreds of faithful pilgrims – clergy and lay, old and young, from north and south, east and west – coming from diverse parishes across the country and uniting in love and adoration of God and devotion to His mother. This is surely something of beauty, and divinely ordained.

Yet, the true nature of the communion was only appreciated fully when I stopped and lifted my head to the stones of the Abbey, and recognised that our communion in that moment was not merely with those beside us, or at the altar, or even with God, but those who have gone before us. In our divine worship and adoration, we were connecting with generations of ancestors who have come in Christian witness and pilgrimage to that very same site.

We were bound together in all the ways God intends us to be. This brings me to the most important point: there was joy, happiness, and excitement in our living faith, giving a palpable sense of the presence of God and an invasion of His grace.

Simply put, God was surely present, not only in the sacrament, and I fell in love with Him anew. Our faith can ossify in isolation but is animated by the communion of our catholic community.   This might have been my first National Pilgrimage, but I hope to be a pilgrim to the Shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham forevermore. I’ll fear not what men say, I’ll labour night and day, To be a pilgrim.

Fidelium is a lay-led network of young Anglo-Catholic Christians in London and beyond, under the patronage of the Bishop of Fulham
www.fideliumlondon.com