Why the Church should promote religious tourism: An expert explains
Religious tourism attracts hundreds of millions worldwide, generating billions in economic activity. The World Religious Tourism Network reports 400 million faith‑based travelers each year, with Latin America hosting 80 million and growing 6‑8% annually. Shrines like Mexico’s Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe and Brazil’s National Shrine of Our Lady of Aparecida draw 22 million and 12 million pilgrims respectively. The article argues the Church should better promote and manage pilgrimage sites to realize spiritual and economic benefits.
about 1 month ago
Religious tourism in the Americas draws hundreds of millions of visitors each year, offering both substantial economic gains and deep spiritual enrichment, yet it remains under‑developed and largely invisible to churches, governments, and businesses. 1
Adrián Lomello, director for the Americas of the World Religious Tourism Network, stresses that a church or basilica must be turned into a tourism product. Essential components include:
Pilgrims spend money on accommodation, food, handicrafts, and local services, spreading benefits beyond the shrine to hotels, restaurants, artisans, and transport providers. This circulation of funds also supports the preservation of the religious sites themselves. 1
Beyond economics, religious tourism can foster personal conversion: pilgrims seeking confession, Mass, or deeper prayer often experience a renewed faith that can lead to sacramental participation. 1
Spain’s Camino de Santiago attracts ≈530 000 pilgrims yearly and contributes over US $580 million to the economy, illustrating how long‑term planning, policy support, and infrastructure can unlock a destination’s full potential. 1
Lomello calls for a collaborative effort among dioceses, parishes, civil authorities, businesses, and local communities. Key actions include:
Referencing Pope Leo XIV’s call to “lift up your gaze,” Lomello urges the Church to view religious tourism as an opportunity for development that complements, rather than competes with, its mission. 1
These figures underscore the vast, yet under‑leveraged, potential of religious tourism across the region. 1 2*
Evaluate Catholic tourism’s role in ecclesial mission and economy
Catholic tourism can serve the Church’s mission and support local economies, but only when it remains ordered to evangelization, human encounter, cultural stewardship, and the common good. It becomes contrary to that mission when sacred places are treated primarily as commercial attractions or financial assets.
Catholic tourism includes pilgrimages, visits to shrines and churches, religious-cultural tours, heritage interpretation, retreats, and hospitality connected with places of Christian significance. Its ecclesial value cannot be measured simply by visitor numbers or revenue. The deeper question is whether tourism helps people encounter Christ, the Christian community, the Church’s history, and the call to conversion.
The Church’s cultural heritage is not merely decorative or historical. Ecclesiastical buildings have been places of worship, prayer, memory, art, charity, and social identity. The Pontifical Council for Culture notes that religious buildings possess both symbolic, artistic, and historical value, while also recognizing that their pastoral use is affected by secularization, demographic change, mobility, and declining religious practice.
Tourism can therefore become a form of pre-evangelization: an initial encounter that awakens curiosity about the Gospel. A visitor may enter a cathedral for its architecture and discover the sacramental, biblical, and charitable meaning of the building. A pilgrimage may begin as cultural travel but become an occasion for confession, Mass, silence, prayer, or renewed belonging to the Church.
This missionary possibility depends upon interpretation. A church presented only as a monument is reduced to an object of aesthetic consumption. A church explained as a living sign of faith can become a place where visitors perceive the relationship between worship, doctrine, art, community, and service.
Tourism must not displace the Church’s primary purpose. The guidelines state that a church is essentially a building used for Catholic divine worship and warn against the habitual use of churches for non-liturgical activities while religious celebrations occur only sporadically.
This principle has direct implications for tourism:
The Church’s mission is not served by maximizing access at the cost of reverence. Nor is it served by closing sacred places so completely that seekers cannot encounter them. The appropriate model is ordered hospitality: welcoming visitors while preserving prayer, silence, liturgical life, and the rights of the faithful.
Tourism can provide resources for the preservation of churches, shrines, works of art, archives, monasteries, and religious landscapes. This is especially important where declining parish participation and reduced financial resources make maintenance difficult. The Pontifical Council for Culture identifies the underuse and abandonment of churches as a growing problem in many Western societies.
Revenue from responsible tourism can help fund:
However, ecclesial heritage should not be managed as though it were simply a commercial product. Canonical administration requires ecclesiastical goods and cultural objects to be inventoried, conserved, and supervised responsibly. The guidelines refer to the duties of administrators and Ordinaries concerning the protection of ecclesiastical property, proper inventories, insurance, and safeguards against damage or illicit alienation.
The economic benefit of tourism is therefore legitimate only within a broader framework of stewardship. Income is a means, not the governing end.
Catholic tourism can benefit the economy through employment, hospitality, transport, restaurants, museums, artisans, publishing, conservation, and local agriculture. It can also sustain communities whose identity and economic life are closely connected with shrines or historic churches.
Yet Catholic economic thought resists the idea that economic success is equivalent to the accumulation of wealth. The analysis of Vincent McNabb’s Catholic agrarianism emphasizes that economy should be understood as the management of the household and should remain connected to human flourishing, created goods, and the needs of the community.
This provides an important criterion for evaluating Catholic tourism. Tourism is economically sound when it:
McNabb’s distinction between producing what is needed and pursuing “mere wealth-getting” is particularly relevant. His critique warns that economic activity becomes disordered when profit becomes its exclusive measure. Catholic tourism should therefore be judged not only by how much money it generates, but by whom it serves, what it preserves, and whether it strengthens or weakens the human community.
Tourism can revitalize areas, but it can also displace local populations, inflate housing costs, overload infrastructure, commercialize traditions, and make historic centers function primarily as visitor zones. These risks are especially serious when the local population becomes a backdrop for tourism rather than the primary community served by the Church.
The Catholic understanding of created goods offers a corrective. The theological account presented in the sources stresses that material goods are ordered to the needs of all, not merely to exclusive accumulation. Land and its fruits are gifts whose use is subject to the demands of justice and the moral community.
Applied to tourism, this means that ecclesial authorities and civil partners should ask:
A Catholic tourism strategy should be subsidiary—supporting local communities rather than replacing them—and participatory, involving parishioners, civil authorities, cultural experts, businesses, and charitable organizations.
The Pontifical Council for Culture specifically recommends that ecclesial authorities share decisions with the ecclesial community and dialogue with civil society, taking account of the territory and its cultural context. This principle is applicable not only to former churches but also to the management of living religious sites that receive visitors.
Catholic tourism can also contribute to Christian unity and intercultural understanding. Historic Christian sites often bear witness to the shared baptism, Scriptures, saints, and traditions of different Christian communities. Visitors may encounter Catholic, Orthodox, Anglican, Methodist, or Reformed histories within the same region.
The ecumenical speeches of Paul VI and John Paul II emphasize that dialogue, collaboration, and common witness can foster greater understanding and charity, while also acknowledging that full communion in faith and sacramental life has not yet been restored.
Tourism should not blur doctrinal differences or present Christian unity as already complete. Properly conducted, however, it can:
John Paul II describes ecumenical dialogue as a means through which divine providence works toward overcoming division, and he stresses the importance of prayer, dialogue, collaboration, and common witness. Catholic tourism can become one modest setting for such encounters when it is oriented toward truth and charity.
Catholic tourism faces several pastoral and economic dangers.
The first danger is treating shrines, relics, liturgies, and devotional objects as commodities. The guidelines insist on particular safeguards for relics and highly venerated sacred images, including prohibitions and restrictions concerning their sale or transfer. This reflects a wider principle: what is sacred cannot be reduced to merchandise.
Religious festivals may become performances designed for visitors rather than acts of faith offered by a living community. This can weaken popular piety and separate cultural symbols from the Gospel that gave them meaning.
A parish or diocese that becomes financially dependent on visitor spending may gradually prioritize tourists over parishioners, or commercial income over pastoral needs. Tourism should diversify support for mission, not determine the Church’s identity.
Large pilgrim flows can harm landscapes, increase waste, and place pressure on water, transport, and housing. McNabb’s insistence that responsible stewardship of creation is inseparable from economy provides a theological basis for ecological limits and sustainable practice.
A purely secular presentation can distort Catholicism by reducing it to art, architecture, national identity, or sentiment. Good interpretation should communicate both historical complexity and the living faith of the Church.
A sound model would combine five elements:
The Pontifical Council for Culture’s preference for reuse, restoration, regeneration, and recycling—rather than needless sale or destruction—shows how heritage management can be connected with a circular economy and social inclusion. The same approach can guide tourism: preserve what is valuable, use resources responsibly, repair rather than discard, and direct economic activity toward renewed communal life.
Catholic tourism is neither automatically a missionary success nor merely a commercial enterprise. Its value depends upon its ordering. It can open people to faith, preserve the Church’s heritage, sustain local economies, create encounters across cultures, and support charitable work. But it can also commercialize the sacred, burden communities, damage the environment, and replace worship with consumption.
The decisive measure is not visitor volume or financial return but Christ and the common good. Catholic tourism fulfills its ecclesial vocation when economic activity remains subordinate to evangelization, reverence, justice, stewardship, and the strengthening of the communities in which the Church lives.