We see more walking companions, resting in small groups chatting in Italian on breaks in the shade of olive trees. One group of young women leaves a stone booth with a Virgin Mary altar (one crosses herself, kissing her hand) and a spigot of cool water.

It’s a 15-mile passage that is longer than any one-day walk in our long lives. Except for serious bicyclists going north, away from Rome, we often have the way south to ourselves, just we two and that mourning dove’s theme that seems to follow us. Watching my feet (oh my feet!) over rutted clay and gravel mixed with shards of pottery and terra cotta, I feel more like a weary mule than a pilgrim. Walking over broken civilizations as old as the Etruscans.

I mentioned in yesterday’s blog post that the millennium of pilgrimages from about the 6^th century created something like a Western Christian identity. That cultural identity may be like the shards of a broken civilization we are walking over.

But it seems like the foundation of a very fine culture here, a friendliness, hospitality and habitual care for the beautiful. It may be that the gospel message-in-a-bottle that produced that culture has died to live again. It’s life-giving, an Easter thing. G.K. Chesterton suggests that Christianity has died five times, and is always reborn afresh. It has its April spring times, like when St. Francis danced in Umbria.

When I read the news about Trump’s attacks on Pope Leo XIV (who is now in Africa, giving hope to the growing Catholic faithful there), and the fake AI images he has re-posted of himself as a healing Jesus, I am flabbergasted (as are most Europeans, obviously.) The religion that Trump tries to invoke is grotesque, to me, for it is entirely based on politics, and politics in its awful dysfunctional current state. It is not based on a true Christian identity, or on a sound theology.

This is because America doesn’t have a true Christian identity. It has a different cultural substrate. America’s culture is America – unique, but not superior. It is “one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.” At least, that’s what we learned as children.  

Now the Republican leaders are opportunistically using their political “Christianity” to hold a week-long reading of the Bible from Genesis through Revelation, “America Reads the Bible,” starting today. Trump pre-recorded a passage from II Chronicles 7.

“If My people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land.”

Trump is not God, as one lady’s sign said at the No Kings rally I covered in Jasper, Ga., for the weekly Pickens County Progress. “He just thinks he is.” She said God dictated that sign and told her to join the protest.

To ask Trump to humble himself is a lot to ask, even of God. To ask Trump voters, the ones who do sincerely pray, to realize that they’ve been lied to, that is also a lot to ask. Yet we pray, for Trump and for his followers. Change is possible.

Libby tried to get back to sleep the other night, and her sci-fi book wasn’t working. So she pulled up The Book of Common Prayer on her Kindle. And she read the Great Litany, including this:

“That it may please thee so to rule the hearts of thy servants, the President of the United States (or of this nation), and all others in authority, that they may do justice, and love mercy, and walk in the ways of truth, We beseech thee to hear us, good Lord.”