The ‘Camino’ of St. Francis: New California pilgrimage route offers a spiritual journey
A new 24.56‑mile Camino de San Francisco links Mission San Rafael Arcángel to Mission Dolores in San Francisco. The route is split into four segments, letting pilgrims choose walks of different lengths. Father Christopher Iwancio devised the trail after seeing the San Antonio missions, aiming to award pilgrims credit toward the Camino de Santiago de Compostela. Walkers can earn stamps and distance certificates, and may travel alone or in groups, integrating spiritual and corporal work.
12 days ago
A new California pilgrimage route, the Camino de San Francisco, connects Mission San Rafael Arcángel in Marin County with Mission Dolores in San Francisco. Inspired by St. Francis of Assisi and California’s historic mission trails, the route combines walking, prayer, service to others and reflection during the Jubilee Year of St. Francis.
The Camino covers 24.56 miles of streets, paths and trails divided into four segments, allowing pilgrims to complete the journey in stages or as a continuous walk.
Capuchin Franciscan Father Christopher Iwancio developed the idea after visiting the El Camino de San Antonio Missions in Texas, which has a partnership with Spain’s Camino de Santiago de Compostela. That experience prompted him to consider how California’s missions could support a similar pilgrimage.
Iwancio worked with historian and author Christian Clifford, with assistance from Peter Marlow of the Archdiocese of San Francisco, to establish a route that would be accessible and practical for pilgrims.
Pilgrims who complete the California route can receive credit toward the Camino de Santiago de Compostela’s Camino Inglés, provided they obtain stamps from the missions in their pilgrimage passports and documentation of the distance traveled.
The organizers say the connection gives the California pilgrimage a lasting structure while allowing people to participate individually or in groups.
The route is intended to be more than a walk between historic churches. Its organizers have incorporated opportunities to practice the corporal and spiritual works of mercy, including preparing sandwiches for unhoused people and other service activities.
Peter Marlow described the pilgrimage as combining personal prayer and reflection with practical assistance to people in need in and around San Francisco.
Father Robert Barbato, rector of the National Shrine of St. Francis of Assisi in San Francisco, said the route reflects both the natural beauty of Marin County and the difficult realities faced by people in the city. He associated the pilgrimage with encountering God through creation and through service to the poor.
The Camino was created in conjunction with the Jubilee Year of St. Francis and was presented as an expression of Pope Leo’s call for a special year dedicated to the saint. Organizers also emphasized the significance of establishing the route in San Francisco, a city named after St. Francis of Assisi.
Father Iwancio said pilgrimage can create spaces for peace, human encounter and openness to Christ. He described the journey through the city as an opportunity for pilgrims to recognize welcome, community and the needs of others along the way.
Investigate the Catholic Church’s historic role in establishing pilgrimage routes
The Catholic Church played a decisive role in transforming scattered journeys to holy places into organized, enduring pilgrimage routes. Its contribution involved identifying and preserving sacred sites, establishing shrines and churches, arranging hospitality and protection, regulating pilgrim movement, and integrating pilgrimage into Christian worship and European society. The Church did not invent travel to sacred places, nor did it create every road itself; rather, it Christianized existing travel networks and gave them institutional and spiritual coherence.
During the first three centuries, pilgrimage was not yet a central feature of Christian worship. The Church was cautious about practices associated with Jewish and pagan pilgrimage. Nevertheless, devotion to the martyrs gradually created a specifically Christian form of sacred travel: believers visited the tombs of those who had witnessed to Christ.
After Christianity gained legal recognition in the fourth century, pilgrimage expanded dramatically. Jerusalem became a major destination, and travelers such as the Bordeaux pilgrim and Egeria documented journeys to the Holy Land. Pilgrims participated in liturgical celebrations at sites associated with Christ’s life, death, and resurrection. Their reports also helped spread Jerusalem’s rites elsewhere; processions such as Palm Sunday and later the Stations of the Cross were influenced by liturgical practices observed in the Holy City.
The Church’s role was therefore not merely devotional. Pilgrimage helped create a shared Christian memory anchored in physical places.
A principal way the Church established pilgrimage routes was by developing shrines at places associated with Christ, the Apostles, martyrs, and saints. In Jerusalem, churches were built over sites believed to be connected with the Gospel events. St. Helena’s pilgrimage and Constantine’s construction of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre gave institutional form to devotion at Calvary and the tomb of Christ.
Rome developed as another central destination. Pilgrims visited the tombs of Saints Peter and Paul, the catacombs, and the city’s basilicas. The pilgrimage to Rome also expressed communion with the universal Church and recognition of the special pastoral role of the successor of Peter.
Other routes grew around the tombs or relics of saints:
These were not isolated destinations. Roads converged upon them from many regions, especially Santiago, where pilgrims traveled on foot from across Europe. The route became simultaneously religious, social, and charitable.
The evidence indicates that clerics were among the earliest organizers of pilgrimage as a system. They prepared routes, identified stopping places, and mapped cities of call. Organized groups of pilgrims could receive protection, while hospices were established along the way for travelers who were poor, sick, or unable to complete the journey without assistance.
This infrastructure depended on cooperation among monasteries, bishops, confraternities, rulers, and local communities. Churches and religious houses offered lodging, food, worship, and medical or charitable care. Pilgrimage thus stimulated the development of roads, bridges, hospitals, markets, and settlements, although the supplied material does not permit attributing every such construction directly to the Church.
Christian charity also widened participation. Hospices assisted those physically unable to travel, while charitable practices allowed others to share spiritually in the work of pilgrimage. The route was consequently not only a line between two places but a network of Christian hospitality.
As pilgrimage became widespread, ecclesiastical and civil regulation followed. Medieval laws established legitimate periods of absence for clergy undertaking pilgrimages and set rules governing travel. The Church’s interest was partly pastoral: pilgrimage needed to remain compatible with clerical obligations and orderly Christian life.
Security was an equally serious issue. Pilgrims faced banditry, warfare, poor roads, and political instability. Rulers sometimes protected routes, while military campaigns—including the Crusades—were justified in part by the desire to make access to Jerusalem possible for Christian pilgrims. The Church’s historical involvement in this area was therefore complex: it promoted access and protection, but this could become entangled with political power and armed conflict.
That distinction matters. The Church’s spiritual objective was access to holy places; the historical means sometimes involved alliances with rulers and military institutions. These should not be treated as identical aspects of pilgrimage.
The Catholic Church’s routes helped connect regions that were otherwise divided by language, ethnicity, and political boundaries. The medieval Church itself describes pilgrimage as contributing to the development of Western Christianity, the amalgamation of peoples, and the exchange of ideas and values across Europe.
Pilgrims carried more than devotional practices. They transmitted stories, artistic forms, liturgical customs, architectural models, charitable traditions, and news. Shrines also influenced literature and popular culture; the growth of European epic literature was closely connected with famous pilgrim sanctuaries.
The routes consequently functioned as a kind of religious infrastructure for Christian Europe. They helped create a common cultural world centered on Jerusalem, Rome, Compostela, and the sanctuaries of local saints.
Pilgrimage declined in the modern period because of religious conflict, the Protestant movement, the Enlightenment, and changing cultural conditions. Physical travel was increasingly replaced by interior or symbolic forms of pilgrimage, such as the Stations of the Cross.
From the nineteenth century onward, pilgrimage revived in a new form, often centered on shrines that expressed the religious and cultural identity of particular peoples. Lourdes, Fatima, Guadalupe, Czestochowa, Aparecida, Knock, and many others became major destinations.
Modern Catholic teaching continues to understand pilgrimage as more than tourism: it is a journey to a sacred place undertaken for a religious purpose. It can involve conversion, prayer, penance, communal identity, service, and encounter with other peoples.
Historically, the Church established pilgrimage routes through five interconnected actions:
The Church was therefore less the inventor of every road than the principal institution that turned roads into Christian pilgrimage networks. The available evidence strongly supports this ecclesial role, though it does not by itself provide a complete history of the engineering, financing, or pre-Christian origins of each individual route.