Pilgrim on Trek to 365 Churches in 365 Days

c. 2007 Religion News Service (UNDATED) David Heimann is not your ordinary pilgrim. Every day, the Illinois native walks into a different Roman Catholic church. Afterward, he turns to the Internet to blog about his experience, linking to pictures of the churches through Google Earth, a program that provides satellite imagery of any location in […]

c. 2007 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) David Heimann is not your ordinary pilgrim.

Every day, the Illinois native walks into a different Roman Catholic church. Afterward, he turns to the Internet to blog about his experience, linking to pictures of the churches through Google Earth, a program that provides satellite imagery of any location in the world.


In January, Heimann left his job as a pastoral assistant for youth ministry at St. Ignatius Church in Chicago to embark upon a yearlong, high-tech pilgrimage that will take him to 365 churches in 35 countries across five continents. He says he hopes his journey will promote solidarity within the Catholic church by making members aware of the vast community of Catholics across the globe.

“Sometimes … we become so focused on our immediate experience of church that our only community is the one we go to every Sunday,” Heimann said. “As you look across the United States and across the world, of course (the church) is thriving with great diversity, and it’s easy to show on a Web site.”

Heimann is not the only one taking advantage of Internet technology to spread his faith.

Last year, Boston Cardinal Sean O’Malley became the first U.S. cardinal to launch a blog, noting that the forum would enable him to communicate with Catholics of all ages in Boston and beyond. His blog is available at http://www.cardinalseansblog.org.

And Beliefnet, a nondenominational Web site founded in 1999, offers religious news, blogs and quizzes, such as “How spiritual are you about your weight loss?” It tallies more than 3.1 million unique visitors each month to http://www.beliefnet.com.

“In every period of history in the church, when new technologies have emerged, it has caused a spiritual revolution,” Heimann said. “The invention of the printing press radically changed the way we face reality. It also changed the way Catholics got involved with their faith (through) missalettes and scripture readings of the day.”

Heimann’s trip is funded by private donations through Ad Sodalitatem, an Illinois-based nonprofit corporation that he helped found. Keeping in line with its technological bent, Ad Sodalitatem has an account on myspace.com, an online social network, to spread the word about its projects.

So far, Heimann’s blog, at http://adsodalitatem.org, has been met with enthusiasm.

Meg Matuska, the director of music at the Church of the Resurrection in Solon, Ohio, said several members of her choir have kept up with the blog since Heimann’s visit Jan. 7.


“I think it will be even more interesting when he’s overseas,” she said. “As he goes to Third World countries, those of us in the First World, who have already been visited by him and are already tuned into the blog, will certainly have our eyes opened to experiences that are different from ours but are still part of the church.”

Heimann will travel around the U.S. until he leaves for South Korea Feb. 6.

He also plans to visit Vietnam, India, Italy, Israel, Rwanda, Bolivia and Turkey, but wants to spend the majority of his time in Third World nations.

In the U.S., he has already visited a wide variety of churches, from the small, rural parish of St. Damian, in Damiansville, Ill., where his grandparents are buried, to the Basilica of the Sacred Heart at the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Ind.

Heimann said he plans to create 30-minute lesson plans for schools and parishes outlining Catholic teaching on global solidarity, using his experiences and photos from his travels to augment the project.

At the end of his trip, he said, he hopes to have found where “the heart and the Holy Spirit are working together” through technology.

DSB/LFEND BOYLE

Editors: To obtain photos of David Heimann and pictures taken by Heimann of St. Ignatius Church in Chicago and the Basilica of St. Louis, King, in St. Louis, go to the RNS Web site at https://religionnews.com. On the lower right, click on “photos,” then search by subject or slug.


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