From Answered Prayer to 94 Basilicas: How One Pilgrim Captured the Heart of Catholic America
After receiving a full-tuition scholarship and grants to attend The Catholic University of America, Grady Connolly fulfilled his promise to visit the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception every day during his freshman year. That daily devotion inspired a four-year journey to visit all 94 minor basilicas in the United States. Connolly’s new book shares the stories of the basilicas and brings American devotion to the Blessed Mother to life.
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Grady Connolly’s four-year pilgrimage to all 94 U.S. minor basilicas began after he promised to visit the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception daily if he received help paying for college. His new book combines the churches’ histories and architecture with stories of Catholic faith, sacrifice and Marian devotion across the country.
As a high-school student, Connolly prayed at the National Shrine in Washington, D.C., for help affording tuition at The Catholic University of America. He later received a full-tuition scholarship and grants covering room and board, and fulfilled his promise by visiting the shrine every day during his freshman year.
That routine helped prompt a journey lasting four years, with Connolly traveling by plane, train and car to visit every minor basilica in the United States. His resulting book, published by Ave Maria Press, presents the churches’ histories, architecture and religious life.
Connolly describes basilicas as churches recognized by the pope for their historical significance, beauty and sacramental life, and as places that connect local Catholic communities with Rome. His visits showed him how churches large and small reflect the sacrifices of the people who built and sustained them.
Among the examples he highlights is the Cathedral Basilica of St. Louis, known for its extensive mosaics; its 1926 opening drew about 100,000 people to a Eucharistic procession. In Dyersville, Iowa, parishioner Francis Xavier donated his life savings to secure the land for the Basilica of St. Francis Xavier after the parish learned its original church stood on land it did not own.
The article notes that 37 of the 94 basilicas are dedicated to Mary, including eight honoring the Immaculate Conception, patroness of the United States. Connolly also recounts how parishioners at Brooklyn’s Basilica of Regina Pacis prayed during World War II for their family members’ safe return, then donated jewelry to make crowns for statues of Mary and the Infant Jesus; Pope Pius XII blessed the crowns.
Each minor basilica displays an ombrellino, or ceremonial umbrella, and a tintinnabulum, or bell, traditional insignias of its connection with the papacy. Connolly says the churches’ papal associations reinforce their role as places where Catholics can encounter Christ.
Connolly hopes the book’s photographs, histories and reflections will encourage readers to make pilgrimages and appreciate the beauty of their own churches. He says his travels strengthened his conviction that the Holy Spirit is at work in the United States and that Catholics are called to continue building the Church.
Marian devotion and the role of pilgrimage in American Catholic identity
Marian devotion and pilgrimage have helped give American Catholic identity a visible, embodied form: Catholics gather, pray, remember, and travel as a people, not merely as individuals with private beliefs. But the Church’s understanding of this identity is not that a nation or shrine replaces Christ. Mary is honored as the first among believers and as a mother who leads the faithful to her Son; pilgrimage is meant to deepen faith and issue in worship, sacramental life, and service. The supplied materials illuminate these theological and communal dimensions, though they do not provide enough evidence for a full history of Marian devotion across the many Catholic communities of the United States.
Marian devotion is properly understood within the Church’s worship of God. The shrine document cites St. Ambrose’s distinction: Mary was “the temple of God, not the God of the temple”; God alone is to be adored. It describes Mary as the first among believers and as a spiritual mother, whose presence strengthens the faith of those who seek her at shrines. This distinction matters for American Catholic identity: devotion to Mary is not a rival allegiance alongside Christianity, but a way Catholics express their relationship to Christ through the mother who believed in him.
Pope Francis describes this movement plainly: at a Marian shrine, pilgrims come to Mary and, through her gaze, are brought to Jesus, “the Way, the Truth and the Life.” Marian devotion can therefore shape a Catholic identity that is affectionate and personal without being self-enclosed. It turns believers toward Christ and, in the Church’s account, toward one another as brothers and sisters.
The Church also cautions that Marian piety should be integrated with the liturgy, which is the center of a shrine’s life. The shrine document says that encounter with Mary should lead pilgrims into the paschal mystery—that is, Christ’s passage through suffering and death to resurrection—through hearing the Word, celebrating the sacraments, and committing themselves to their neighbors. The implication is that Marian devotion is not measured only by the intensity of a feeling or the frequency of a visit. Its fruit should be a more Christ-centered and charitable life.
Pilgrimage gives Catholic faith a physical and shared expression. The Church’s Directory on Popular Piety and the Liturgy notes that pilgrimage revived in the nineteenth century in a changed form: shrines increasingly embodied the faith or cultural identity of particular peoples, and its list of examples includes Washington. That observation offers a useful frame for the American setting. A shrine can be a place of prayer and also a public sign that a community has a religious memory and a shared practice.
A doctrinal note on Mary captures the spiritual meaning of setting out together:
“The decision to set out toward the shrine is already a confession of faith; walking is a true song of hope; and arrival is the encounter of love.”
The quotation presents pilgrimage not simply as travel to a destination but as an enacted confession. The journey involves leaving ordinary security, relying on others, and arriving among fellow worshippers. That communal character can matter especially in a society where religious identity is not assumed to be the public norm. Pilgrims become visible as a people whose faith is practiced together.
Francis likewise describes pilgrimage as a way of realizing “that we are a people,” made up of many faces, cultures, languages, and traditions. In his account, the shared journey can foster fraternity, turn resentments into opportunities for fellowship, and send people back into the world with a commitment to solidarity. This is not a claim that pilgrimage automatically resolves social divisions. Rather, it describes what pilgrimage can ask of Catholics: to travel and worship together, and to let that experience challenge division.
The materials suggest two complementary dimensions of American Catholic identity. One is belonging to a wider Church. In 1948, Pius XII welcomed a large American pilgrimage to Rome as a witness to the American Church’s attachment to the See of Peter and to Christ’s Vicar. The pilgrimage was connected to a Catholic catechetical congress and a commitment to religious education. This episode shows pilgrimage functioning not only as devotion but as an expression of ecclesial unity and a prompt to carry a religious mission home.
The other dimension is the formation of local and national memory. The Church’s directory explicitly places Washington among shrines that can embody a people’s faith or cultural identity. The shrine document adds that Marian shrines can become places where not only individuals but whole societies seek to encounter Mary and find renewed strength in faith. Together, these sources suggest that pilgrimage can help American Catholics understand themselves as participants in both a local society and a universal Church.
That identity has also taken shape against social pressures. A scholarly review included in the supplied material describes anti-Catholic movements as a recurring feature of American history, quoting historian Sydney Ahlstrom’s stark formulation, “America was an anti-Catholic movement.” That is a broad interpretive claim reported in a review, not a sufficient account of the entire American Catholic experience. Still, it helps explain why public gatherings, shrines, and pilgrimages could carry significance beyond private devotion: they made Catholic communal life visible and sustained a shared memory.
The Church’s account of pilgrimage is ultimately missionary. The shrine document says that pilgrims, strengthened through their encounter with Mary, should be impelled to proclaim God’s mighty works through words and the witness of their lives. In this sense, the pilgrimage is not an escape from ordinary responsibilities. It is a temporary journey meant to renew the way Catholics return to family, parish, work, and civic life.
This also gives a standard for evaluating Marian devotion in American Catholic culture. A shrine or pilgrimage serves Catholic identity well when it strengthens faith in Christ, remains joined to the Church’s liturgical and sacramental life, and forms pilgrims in solidarity and witness. It would be a misunderstanding to treat Mary as the endpoint of Christian worship, or to regard pilgrimage as a substitute for conversion and service. The sources instead present Mary as a companion and intercessor, and pilgrimage as a shared journey whose destination is a deeper life in God.
The available materials therefore support a theological and pastoral account of the relationship: Marian devotion gives Catholic identity a maternal and relational shape; pilgrimage gives that identity a public, communal, and mobile form. In the American context, these practices can express attachment to the universal Church, preserve religious memory, and bring Catholics together across communities. Their fullest meaning, however, is realized when the journey continues after the shrine—in sacramental life, charity, fraternity, and witness to Christ.