A travel guide for holiday makers in Catholic Europe

Highways and Byways: A European Pilgrimage.

by Nicholas Schofield, (Gracewing, £15.99 / €18.99)

The author Nicholas Schofield, aside from being a parish priest in Uxbridge, has also been an historian and antiquarian and a long time columnist of the Catholic Times.

He has previously written Highways and Byways: discovering Catholic England. In this book spreads his wings to provide an overview of places of Catholic and Marian interest across Europe from, as the blurb might say, Andorra to Zaragoza.  All that in 103 short chapters.

I always find these kinds of books an agreeable pleasure, as they provide vivid little vignettes of people and places without going on too long. At this time of the year when so many of us are planning, or attempting to plan, they help us to plan a holiday that will not get us involved in the anti-tourist protests that are sweeping over parts of Europe, such as Spain and Venice, and to seek out and visit lesser know places, with the emphasis on those of Catholic interest.

The brief chapters are broadly divided into sections on Rome, on Southern Europe, Western Europe,  Central Europe, Eastern Europe, and Northern Europe. But his chapters are less rigidly organised for he leaps boldly from country to country and back again.

He deals briefly, in an Irish context, with “Catholic Memories in the Phoenix Park”, Kerrytown, Kincasslagh (focused on the penal Laws and Mass Rocks),  Knock and Kylemore Abbey. This will give the reader an idea of the sorts of places that interest him as a man of traditionalist outlook. This is not a book for the stay-at-homes, but for the actively religious.

Being English Schofield naturally gives attention to British links with the remoter districts of Europe – though surely he ought to be aware that in European references to Schottische monks are in fact to Irish monks, our saints being as often as not called Scotti in those days.

In other places he certainly surprises the reader. About San Marino he points out the citizens of this little republic that has managed adroitly to survive the ages on its difficult to access mountain top, for a time resisted in arms the efforts of Papal agents to seize the statelet for the Papal States. But the Pope of the day finally saw to it that they remained free. In 1944, imagining San Marino to have been seized by the retreating German, the hilltop capital was bombed by the Americans.

As I say these are brief encounters, but at times too brief, as I feel he could have got more out of his days in Scandinavia, and to have made more of the royal tombs in Roskilde in Denmark, or the extraordinary surviving wooden churches of medieval Norway.

But the past is all too often relevant today. Writing about the Austrian Abbey of  Melk (famous from Umberto Eco’s bestseller The Name of the Rose), he writes how the Irish St Coloman, was unable to communicate with the locals and was put to death. Later he was credited with many miracles and favours.

On their website, monks of Melk draw out St Coloman’s significance for the twenty-first century: “’In our times, where listening to each other has become increasingly difficult, he can be seen as a contemporary saint, as he, in a strange land, was not understood. Whoever is different, looks or speaks differently, makes himself suspicious and causes fear easily become the victim of prejudice’. The Irish pilgrim continues to challenge a millennium after his violent death.”