The Road to Santiago: Pilgrims of St. James

Jesuit Saint has travelled in recent years even further than it did when he was alive. I was all the more anxious to turn aside from the Road of St. James to Xavier, as my visit would coincide with the anniversary of his burial in Goa in 1554.
    The castle of Xavier belonged to his mother, who was of a noble Basque family and was called María Azpilcueta Xavier. His father, Juan de Jasso, was Privy Councillor of Jean d’Albret, King of Navarre. I did not, alas, have time to visit the Jesuit College, as I had to catch the only bus of the day to Pamplona, but I had time to slip into the church and say a prayer to the great collaborator of his fellow-Basque, St. Ignatius; his letters describing his perilous adventures, his struggles, his deceptions, his triumphant faith, in spite of all obstacles, are among the great books of the world. In the peace and serenity of his church I murmured to myself, as I gazed at the Crucifix above the altar, the Saint’s prayer O Deus ego amo te, which the English eighteenth-century Catholic poet Alexander Pope so beautifully rendered:

    Thou art my God, sole object of my love;
    Not for the hope of endless joys above;
    Not for the fear of endless pains below,
    Which they who love Thee not must undergo.

    For me, and such as me, Thou deign’st to bear
    An ignominious Cross, the nails, the spear:
    A thorny crown transpierced Thy sacred brow
    While bloody sweats from every member flow.

    For me in tortures Thou resign’st Thy breath,
    Embraced me on the Cross, and saved me by Thy death.
    And can these sufferings fail my heart to move?
    What but Thyself can now deserve my love?

    Such as then was, and is, Thy love to me,
    Such is, and shall be still, my love to Thee
    To Thee, Redeemer! mercy’s sacred spring!
    My God, my Father, Maker and my King! *

    My meditations on St. Francis were interrupted by the honk of the motor bus in the plaza outside the monastery. It was crowded, but the conductor was one I had met in the taverns of Sangiiesa and he found me a comfortable place. We soon rejoined the main road near Yesa and rapidly reached Monreal, where there are the remains of a castle reminding us of the Middle Ages. In the twelfth century there was a hospice nearby for pilgrims to St. James. There was spring in the air, but the countryside was parched and in some parts planetary like the surface of the moon.
    I became very good friends with Manuel, the conductor. He found bus-conducting a trifle dull after his adventurous life. He had panhandled his way all over North and South America, had worked in saloons in Galveston, Texas, and on the docks in Liverpool. He had his own individual views of the world, many of which he picked up from his favourite magazine, the Reader’s Digest in its Spanish edition. He discoursed feelingly on the atomic and hydrogen bombs and wondered why the workers of the world did not band themselves together to stop wars. “But the masses,” he said sententiously, “are led by the nose by parasites, the newspapers and politicians. They like wars and rumours of wars because they make the papers more interesting. And the press and the politicians in the Latin countries only live for the day. They are all bluster and no sense.”
    Manuel had more faith in the Nordic, the British and the Dutch.
    “They are quieter,” he said, “and have more common sense and they believe in giving a fair chance to the worker.”
    When we arrived in Pamplona he found me cheap lodgings near the plaza belonging to relations of his who received me as though I had been one of the family.

PAMPLONA, THE FORGOTTEN LEGION AND ST. FERMIN

    Pamplona has always been one of the most hospitable halting-places for Jacobean pilgrims. Even in the eleventh century, in front of the doors of the cathedral, there was the ancient Hospital of San Miguel which grew into a very big hostel for pilgrims, and lasted up to the nineteenth century. The kings in those mediaeval days, too, imposed small taxes on goods entering the city, which was devoted to the upkeep of hostels for the poor. By the sixteenth century, however, these charitable foundations for pilgrims had declined, and there were complaints that there was not enough accommodation in the hospices for women pilgrims. Father Domenico Laffi, an Italian priest who made the pilgrimage to Santiago in the seventeenth century, has written a description of his reception in the cathedral hostel at Pamplona, which has a modern air about it:
    ‘While