Genevieve Brown laughs when asked why she decided to embark on a pilgrimage to visit all 70 churches in the diocese.
“When I started, I didn’t have a profound reason for doing it,” she said. “But by the end, there was a profound reason. I realized that I wanted to embody the closing prayer of the divine praises — May the heart of Jesus, in the Most Blessed Sacrament, be praised, adored, and loved with grateful affection, at every moment, in all the tabernacles of the world, even to the end of time.”
The idea came to the 19-year-old NOVA Community College student after she attended last year’s Mass of Ordination to the Priesthood for new priests of the diocese. “I wanted to visit all the newly ordained priests at their parishes,” she explained. “I had a lot of free time, so I thought, why not visit all the churches. The new priests were pretty spread out, so that’s what I ended up doing.”
From the far eastern reaches of Virginia at St. Francis de Sales Church in Kilmarnock, west to St. John Bosco Church in the Blue Ridge Mountains, and south to St. Isidore the Farmer Church in Orange, the diocese is indeed spread out. Brown created a checklist, touring churches divided by the six deaneries of the diocese. Her record is visiting nine churches in one day.
“If the church was open, I would go in and look up who the priests were at each church and pray for them, and also pray for the intercession of the patron saint of each church,” she said. Ideally, she would pray an hour of the divine office before the Blessed Sacrament, but sometimes she was locked out and the only praying soul around. “If I couldn’t get it in, I would just walk around and soak it all in,” she said.
She set out to finish the pilgrimage in five months, finishing on Jan. 3, the feast day of her patron, St. Genevieve. “I got to learn about a lot of different saints and devotions and got to see a lot of Northern Virginia,” she said. “I bet a lot of people were praying for me when they heard what I was doing, so I’m sure their prayers for me have been fruitful in my life in ways I don’t realize.”
Bolstered by those prayers, Brown was discerning her vocation on the pilgrimage and has decided to seek a life of poverty, chastity and obedience by applying to enter the Dominican Sisters of St. Cecilia in Nashville, Tenn.
A parishioner of St. Mary of the Immaculate Conception Church in Fredericksburg, she is quietly confident that she heard God’s voice on her diocesan pilgrimage and knows that the diocese she calls home is on solid ground. “We are doing very well because we have so many great churches and so many great priests,” she said. “We’re really good with vocations so that’s telling of the quality of people here and the presence of Our Lord in all the churches.”
