(Re)creating a Pilgrimage: A Century of Pilgrimage Reports from Jesuit Novices in Canada (1864-1968)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In 1864, a new type of pilgrimage was implemented in Canada: the Jesuit novitiate pilgrimage. Since the creation of the Society of Jesus (Jesuits) in 1540, a month-long pilgrimage is one experience required of new members. This formative moment has been enshrined in the Constitutions of the order. The experience is also reminiscent of the journey of the founder, St. Ignatius of Loyola (1491-1556), who went to Jerusalem as a young man desirous to imitate Christ, and later applied the moniker ‘the pilgrim’ to himself in an account of his life confided in Luis Gonçalves da Câmara (1555). Pilgrimage was designed as a formative tool to prepare the novices for a life where apostolic availability and poverty were paramount. The experience was often realised after a month-long silent retreat called the Spiritual Exercises that nurtured their spiritual life. In the Canadian novitiate of the Society of Jesus, 1,456 novices undertook such pilgrimage between 1864 and 1968. After the conclusion of their journey, they would write a report on their experience. The Archive of the Jesuits in Canada contains an extended and coherent collection of 1,078 pilgrimage reports that have survived to present and provide invaluable information about the journeys of these pilgrims. This article explores the creation of this pilgrimage as a vernacular adaptation of a formative pilgrimage grounded in a long tradition, codified in the Jesuit Constitutions, and adapted through local ‘Rules for Pilgrims.’ The archival material demonstrates the crystallisation of pilgrimage report as a genre, offering a narrative of the experience in an apostolic key. The Canadian novitiate pilgrimage shares many characteristics with other types of pilgrimages, but shows its originality in its consistent care for personal reports and its core experience of discovery of the local Church through its parishes and pastors.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.006 | 0.008 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.024 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".