MANRESA, Spain (AP) — Josep Lluís Iriberri helps celebrate Mass at a mountaintop basilica, swaps his priest’s robe for a hiking backpack and rallies his latest group of pilgrims literally following him in the footsteps of the 16th-century St. Ignatius.
Iriberri is the do-it-all Jesuit who designed the pilgrimage route to honor the founder of the Society of Jesus and for over a decade has almost single-handedly kept it alive.
Since 2012, when Iriberri started the Camino Ignaciano (Ignatian Way) at the orders of his Jesuit superiors in Barcelona, this 65-year-old Spaniard spends six months a year guiding pilgrims along the trail that recreates the life-changing journey Ignatius made over 500 years ago.
“The Camino Ignaciano is putting flesh on the bones of Ignatius,” Iriberri said recently while an Associated Press journalist accompanied him and about 20 teachers from Jesuit schools in the United States on the final day of their pilgrimage.
At one point on the 13-kilometer (8-mile) hike as the path dips from a village through some woods, Iriberri stops the group to tell them that Ignatius — or his mule — surely stepped on the very stones they stood on, making them natural “relics” of the saint.
“We all know the history of Ignatius, because we have read about it, but being here, walking here …