Trajecta - Volume 33, Issue 1/2, 2025

Inspired by a group pilgrimage to Palestine in 1905, chaplain Arnold Suijs (1870-1941) established a devotional park in the hilly landscape near Nijmegen. Designed to function as an open-air museum and a pilgrimage site, the park started with replicas of buildings from the time of Jesus and a church modeled on the hall of the Last Supper (Cenacle). Visitors flocked to the park during the First World War and beyond, especially because the Netherlands was said to have been spared from war violence thanks to the Sacred Heart devotion.

The consecration of the church in 1915 launched the park as Heilig-Land-Stichting (HLS) – The Holy Land Foundation. The HLS used the park to teach biblical history and increase the devotion to the Sacred Heart. Despite the high number of visitors, critics immediately objected to the awkward combination of science and religion. In 1933, the Sacred Heart statue at the entrance to the park was removed.

In the 1970s, the transformation away from devotion to the Sacred Heart and into a Biblical Open-Air Museum was complete. Another change was yet to come, however. In 2007, the park was renamed Museum Park Orientalis and became a showcase for the three monotheistic world religions, as well as other religions and spiritual movements. Today, the park presents itself as ‘a modern place of pilgrimage where there is room for reflection and contemplation’.

This article studies the development of the pilgrimage sites in Beauraing and Banneux, the two original locations of a wave of apparitions that swept across Belgium in the 1930s. Studying the initiatives of the promoters of the sites and the responses of the devotees, the article traces their evolution from apparition to pilgrimage sites. While the initial response to the enthusiastic devotees was one of controlling and monitoring (as the prime focus was on the visionaries), in a later phase, the pilgrims’ experience gained more importance. The promoters catered to the pilgrims, as they knew the importance of the ‘sensus fidelium’ in the evaluation of Marian apparitions and the positive impression miraculous cures would make. Improving the sites (e.g. establishing hospitals for the sick) and the practical organization of the pilgrimages allowed the sick and other sufferers to visit a site where divine intervention had proven possible and might happen again. Rather than solely studying the material evolution and the perspective of the promotors, this article thus also focuses on how the sites were meant to be experienced and were experienced by the devotees. We will see how the faithful adopted the sites beyond the contours set by the promoters and thus how Beauraing and Banneux became sites where all Marian devotees could find consolation and comfort. They were no longer merely places where visionary children had once been singled out.

This essay answers the question of how Dutch pilgrims traveling to Lourdes relate to various images of Mary. It corrects several assumptions about the importance of the famous site and the expectation of healing. By focusing on pilgrims who are marginalized because of old age, poor health, or lack of mobility, it adds to the understanding of intersecting social inequalities that affect pilgrims’ interpretations of Marian imagery. With an ethnographic approach, the study focuses on a group of elderly Dutch pilgrims traveling to Lourdes from the southern Netherlands. The iconographic elicitation method used in this study reveals how and why these pilgrims select from and respond to different Marian images and what personal meanings they attach to them. The article shows that, for this group, Mary was an ally and a witness to family history who helped them transcend the temporal divides of past and present, the dead and the living. Mary gave them a sense of place-belongingness in a rapidly changing and globalizing world. The conclusion suggests that the findings of this study have implications for historical interpretation of pilgrims’ motives and the function of a central shrine.

Bedevaartplaatsen in Nederland (Pilgrimage places in the Netherlands) is a research project that comprehensively inventories and describes pilgrimage sites in the Netherlands. The team responsible for the project has had to contend with the fact that when Catholicism was banned from public practice in the Republic, Dutch Catholics were forced to go on cross-border pilgrimages to Belgium and Germany. The Catholic revival in the nineteenth century gave rise to a sharp increase in the number of pilgrims going abroad. From its inception, the Belgian Marian shrine of Scherpenheuvel has been hugely popular with people in North Brabant and Limburg. Through the years, however, a number of external events has temporarily obstructed the crossings – the most recent being the COVID 19 pandemic, beginning in 2020. Interviews with six organized groups reveal how traditional patterns fared in the aftermath of the Coronavirus shutdown. And they report on how new procedures for the journey were created. Both the old patterns and the new models illuminate possible responses to inevitable disruptions in the long-term flow of pilgrims to Scherpenheuvel.

Within the larger context of pilgrimage studies, it makes sense to study unrealized plans for sanctuary buildings at pilgrimage sites. Architect drawings for pilgrimage sanctuaries imagine the future of the cult site, revealing the directors’ expectations, and disclosing the architect’s dreams. Nevertheless, scant attention is paid to them. The current study, based on Dutch examples, seeks to remedy this. It finds that the unbuilt basilicas expose the impossibility of the guiding ideas behind the failed schemes and demonstrates that these unrealized plans reflect above all, the fluctuations in the popularity of saints’ cults in the past and the present.