Once the Holy Land was open to Christian travel, believers began to go — to walk where Christ had walked, to pray at the places of the gospel. The fourth-century pilgrim Egeria left a vivid account of her journey. From Jerusalem the practice widened: to Rome and the tombs of the apostles, to Santiago de Compostela, to a thousand local shrines.
Pilgrimage was undertaken for many reasons — devotion, thanksgiving, the seeking of healing, the doing of penance. It was rarely easy, and the difficulty was part of the point: the hard outward road was understood as an image of the inward journey of the soul toward God.
The Reformation questioned aspects of medieval pilgrimage, and the traditions still hold it differently. But the underlying instinct — that the life of faith is a journey, and that some places help us pray — has never left the Church, and pilgrimage continues across the traditions today.