Well, the papal preacher isn’t visiting Medjugorje, but a lot of other people are.

This morning’s Washington Post has an overview of where modern pilgrims are headed –and why. And one of their leading destinations is that little town in the Croatian hillside:

People have been coming to this rocky slope since June 24, 1981, when six children said the Virgin Mary appeared to them here. The crowds have grown so rapidly that an estimated 1 million people will visit this year, part of a global surge in spiritual travel.

According to travel agencies, religious Internet sites and analysts who study trends in spirituality, more people of just about every faith are visiting places with religious significance. Ten times more people are coming to Medjugorje now than a decade ago, and last year a record 6 million people visited the Western Wall, also known as the Wailing Wall, in Jerusalem. Saudi Arabia said 2.1 million people went to Mecca last December, 300,000 more than in 2000. An estimated 70 million Hindus went to the Ganges River in January and February for spiritual cleansing. [snip]

One recent Saturday evening, 166 people gathered at Gate 27C in the Glasgow airport to fly to Split on Croatia’s Adriatic coast, one of the hottest tourist destinations in Europe. When they arrived, (Nora) McNulty and her fellow Scots walked quickly past taxis waiting to take tourists to resort hotels. Instead they boarded buses that carried them four hours into the mountains of Bosnia, past quiet villages to a bustling town transformed by religious pilgrims.

“I have been hearing about this place for years,” said McNulty, who has kind brown eyes, feathery gray hair and a soft, soothing voice. A Catholic who raised six boys and now helps care for her grandchildren, McNulty is a quiet believer who doesn’t make a show of her faith. She began considering a pilgrimage at the urging of her sister, who had come here three times. Then one Sunday at Mass she heard about Medjugorje again, and signed up.

McNulty knows the Vatican hasn’t recognized that anything miraculous happened here, as it has with Lourdes in France and Fatima in Portugal. But that didn’t stop her from saving all year to pay for the $840 week-long trip. She said she believes in miracles, and she noted that the six children who said they saw the Virgin Mary are now in their 30s and 40s and have told unchanging stories of their experience for 26 years.

The Rev. William Fraser, a Catholic priest who accompanied the group from Scotland, said that even if the Vatican never endorses Medjugorje, “it wouldn’t affect what it has meant for me.”

Fraser first came here in the early 1980s and has returned many times. He said he believes more people make religious pilgrimages now because “the physical journey to a place is similar to our own walk in life, not just to a place, but within ourselves. The physical going helps open ourselves to the pilgrimage within. It helps us find the answer to what we are searching for.”

We are all, in one sense or another, pilgrims. Let’s pray the people making pilgrimages to places like Medjugorje find what they are seeking.