Priestly pilgrimage placed faith, feet ‘on the road’

Dominican Fathers Thomas Schaefgen and Francis Orozco gained a new appreciation for the lowly pine needle during the boldest journey of their lives: a 480-mile pilgrimage from New Orleans to Memphis completed entirely on foot, with little more than the clothes on their backs.

“I discovered that pine needles are my favorite surface to walk on,” said Father Schaefgen, sharing lessons from his and Father Orozco’s “Friars on Foot” pilgrimage with more than 100 listeners at the Tulane Catholic Center Sept. 14.

“Pine needles are soft and always cool,” Father Schaefgen, the center’s director, observed. “And where there are pine needles, there are pine trees, and pine trees mean shade!”

Christ the Walker

The priests’ audacious trek began at St. Anthony of Padua Church in New Orleans on May 29 and concluded in Memphis on June 29 at the Shrine of St. Martin de Porres – patron of the duo’s Southern Province of Dominicans.

Their extraordinary jaunt was inspired by the foot-powered ministry modeled by Jesus and his disciples and emulated by St. Dominic, who dispatched his friars, two by two, to preach the Gospel in southern France. Like those 13th-century Dominicans, Fathers Schaefgen and Orozco carried no food or money, and also shed the trappings of their own era, including cell phones.

“The purpose was to do what Dominic did but to do it today,” Father Schaefgen said, noting that the faithful of the 21st century often lose sight of the Christian life as an “adventure” that is lived out in the real world, not just inside church walls and parish offices.

“I’m not saying you have to go walk 500 miles,” Father Schaefgen said. “But it’s when we have to keep going that we actually start growing – no pain, no gain. That’s not just true (of) the physical exertion of the body, but of the spiritual life and the moral life.”

Lightening the load

The two pilgrims wore their white Dominican habits throughout their month-long walk, taking only water, toiletries, sunscreen, bug spray, a medical kit, a change of underclothes and a rain poncho that doubled as a picnic blanket.

They also made room in their backpacks for a few precious books: a journal; a Breviary; the “Magnificat” (for the preparation of homilies as visiting celebrants); and the New Testament.

“No room for the (bulkier) Old Testament,” Father Schaefgen quipped. “Sorry, Moses!”

Because it is illegal to walk along the interstate, the priests’ itinerary took them down local and state highways, forcing them to skirt around the lake by way of LaPlace and Hammond and to track Highway 51 for the length of Mississippi.

While the majority of their overnight rest stops were at parish rectories, other accommodations included a hunting lodge offered by strangers outside of Jackson, Mississippi, and an air mattress inside a church. They walked a daily average of 17 miles, their shortest day requiring “only” eight miles, the longest a blister-inducing 27.

“The churches themselves determined the distances we walked each day,” Father Schaefgen explained, adding that he and Father Orozco rejected all offers of wheeled transportation, inspired by the early Dominicans who chose foot power over horses.

When I was hungry…

With no cash, credit cards or other methods of payment in their pockets, one of the biggest questions the two got before setting out was: “How are you going to eat?” As it turned out, the priests were so inundated with offers of food and drink, they often had to politely decline them.

“We never were hungry – every couple of hours someone met us on the road with food,” said Father Schaefgen, recalling how one Mississippi resident found him and Father Orozco “in the middle of nowhere” two days in a row to give them sandwiches from Walmart.

“It was the most delicious food from Walmart I’ve ever tasted,” Father Schaefgen said, citing another act of generosity that unfolded in Independence, Louisiana.

“A lady drives up and she says, ‘I went down to the Piggly Wiggly and got y’all some fried chicken – that’s all they had,’” Father Schaefgen said. “We said, ‘That’ll do!’”

Although their white habits informed most passersby that they were Catholic, the priestly pedestrians were mistaken for Muslims, Mormons and even beekeepers.

“We’re just not used to seeing anything but the usual on our streets and in our cities and even in our churches,” Father Schaefgen said. “People would ask us: ‘Are you filming a movie? Is there a play?’ The only way they could put this in a context – two men walking down the street in religious garb – was as if it was fiction.

“One of the things we really wanted to achieve was to wake people up, shake them up a little bit,” he added. “No, we’re not filming a movie; we’re real!”

Traveling church

The duo soon reaped the blessings of literally taking the church “to the streets.” Strangers who walked with them asked the priests to hear their confessions, to pray for and with them, and handed them scraps of paper listing their prayer requests.

Many of those who accompanied the Dominicans said that walking – rather than driving –  down roads they had known all their lives allowed them to see landscape features they had never spotted before.

Likewise, the priests began noticing how regularly words such as “road,” “way,” “footsteps,” “path” and “journey” popped up in their daily Breviary readings.

“A lot of the Psalms were written as songs that the pilgrims themselves sang as they made their way to Jerusalem,” Father Schaefgen said, noting that Jesus also “walked a lot” and continually laced his parables with natural imagery to connect with the pedestrian-heavy culture of his day.

The New Orleans-to-Memphis challenge also reminded the two Dominicans of Jesus’ invitation to his followers to “carry no money bag” – to essentially depend on God for all of their needs.

“When you actually do (put everything in God’s hands), he comes through,” Father Schaefgen said. “We can say that from experience!”

Beth Donze can be reached at[email protected].