Remembering the 2025 Chartres Pilgrimage

The Mad Glory of Walking to Chartres

Reflections on the 2025 Pilgrimage by Jack Morgan

There is something splendidly ludicrous about trudging seventy miles in the summer heat, half-starved, wheezing through hayfever, and sleeping on a bit of tarp in a muddy field - all for the sake of a woman who lived two thousand years ago and whom the world insists is no longer relevant. That, of course, is why it makes perfect sense.

Each year, thousands of Catholics from across the globe descend upon Paris, not to sightsee, but to set out - on foot - for the Cathedral of Notre-Dame de Chartres. It is a military campaign without enemies, an exodus without a desert, a battle in which blisters are wounds of honour and songs of praise are the only weapons permitted. And this year, I was among them.

To the modern eye, the pilgrimage is an anachronism. Why walk when when you can take the train? Why sing hymns when you could be streaming podcasts? Why kneel on stone when you could lie on memory foam? But therein lies the point. The walk to Chartres is not meant to be practical. It is meant to be penitential. It is meant to be beautiful. And, like all truly beautiful things, it is a bit mad.

I went expecting a challenge. I did not expect to be running almost entirely on bread rolls, a few ladles of soup, and a scandalous number of Snickers bars. I did not expect the relentless sun that scorched the backs of our necks by day, or the icy dew and dripping condensation that crept into our tents by night. I certainly didn’t expect the hayfever - a full-scale siege of sneezing, sniffling, and eyes so teary I looked perpetually moved by grace, though it was mostly the grass and dust. And yet, I would do it again tomorrow.

There is a strange nobility in watching soldiers and seminarians, nurses and nuns, farmers and students all marching together. Not in lockstep, but in harmony. One moment you are in silence, offering a rosary in reparation. The next, you are belting out old French hymns like a medieval troubadour with heatstroke. In another moment you are partaking in yet another rendition of "Green Grow the Rushes O", just to give yourself the will to enter a twelfth hour of uncomfortably quick plodding onwards. It hardly seems to make a difference. 

This is not spiritual tourism. This is a campaign of the heart. It is a defiance against a world that tells us religion is private, irrelevant, or extinct. Every blister is an argument. Every damp tent is a rebuttal. Every rosary is an act of war, not against flesh and blood, but against apathy, cynicism, and the ever-encroaching cult of comfort. I found myself coughing, sweating, and singing beside strangers I’d never met, and somehow I loved them. We were comrades — not by ideology, nationality, or personality, but by the Cross.

By the third day, I was battered in body and not much better in spirit. I had barely eaten a proper meal. My throat was raw, my nose a battlefield. But as we crested the last hill and caught our first glimpse of the spires of Chartres rising in the distance, like a promise: everything changed!

Suddenly the miles made sense. Suddenly the sacrifices were not only worthwhile but somehow insufficient. I wanted to give more. I wanted to walk further. I wanted to collapse before Our Lady and offer her everything, even the hayfever, even the aching feet, even the hunger pangs.

In the cathedral square, packed shoulder to shoulder with thousands of pilgrims underneath a punishing midday sun, we watched on the big screens as inside the cathedral the Mass of the Ages was unfurled like a tapestry. The chant rose our hearts and minds to God; for a moment we forgot about the blisters. I knelt on stone, surrounded by banners, boots, and tears, and I knew I was home.

Chesterton once quipped that “the world will never starve for want of wonders; but only for want of wonder.” The Chartres pilgrimage is a rolling miracle of Catholic wonder; ancient, joyful, and wildly inconvenient. And precisely because of that, it is necessary.

It is a reminder that the Church is not a bureaucracy or a sentiment, but a living Body. It would seem that occasionally that Body needs to walk sixty miles in the heat, singing, sneezing, and stumbling toward a Gothic shrine, to remember who she is.

In a world drunk on self-indulgence, the Chartres pilgrimage is gloriously sober. In a culture allergic to suffering, it embraces the Cross with song. And in a time when many Catholics are tempted to keep their faith quiet and tidy, ten thousand of us instead marched in dust and defiance, proclaiming with jubilant cry from the boulevards of Paris to the rolling hills of the Ile-de-France, that Notre-Dame de Chrétienté still reigns. 

I limped away from Chartres lighter than I had arrived; not in body, perhaps, but certainly in soul.