It does you good to kneel on the crumbling sidewalks of your own city from time to time. I learned this in early June when Christ came to the streets of the Confederate capital. It was one month before the two hundred fiftieth anniversary of the United States’ founding, one hundred sixty-one years since the surrender at Appomattox. The Richmond leg of the Eucharistic procession organized by the United States Council of Catholic Bishops for the country’s semiquincentennial would take us from the Revolution through slavery, secession, and Jim Crow.

The procession began on Church Hill, across the street from Saint John’s Episcopal Church, where in 1775 Patrick Henry demanded liberty or death. In the shadow of that famous church is Saint Patrick’s Catholic Church, built in 1860 for Irish immigrants, who would join the Confederate cause as enthusiastically as anyone else in the South. I joined a small crowd milling around on the sidewalk outside Saint Patrick’s, where weeds grew up between the bricks. When the door opened and the priest appeared on the porch with the golden monstrance, a cloud of incense wafted out and mingled with the florals of early summer and the garbage and exhaust fumes of the city. Everyone knelt. As the priest stepped carefully down to the street, the only sound was the house sparrows chirping in the gutter.

We formed a line behind him and set off for the Cathedral of the Sacred Heart, two and a half miles west. After the servers with the candles and the thurible and the sanctus bells—rung every thirty seconds, the whole way—and the Blessed Sacrament and six or seven priests came some of the nine perpetual pilgrims making their way from St. Augustine in Florida up to Maine and back again to Philadelphia in time for Independence Day. One of them played the guitar and sang most of the way, up and down hill. We began by singing “O come let us adore Him, for He alone is worthy” to the tune of Adeste fideles.

Spread out over two city blocks there were maybe three hundred of us. (At the country’s founding, the entire Catholic population of Virginia was considerably less than that.) We walked mainly on Grace Street, the less traveled of the crosstown thoroughfares.

A few blocks on we passed a neat rectangle of grass, overlooked on three sides by an apartment building, behind a wrought-iron gate and sign that said, “First Jewish cemetery in Virginia, 1791.” There were no gravestones.

After Church Hill we processed through Shockoe Bottom, a neighborhood of bars and warehouse apartments at the river’s edge. Here were the slave auction houses and the slave jail called the Devil’s Half Acre. In the decades before the Civil War, only New Orleans did a brisker business in human flesh. The bones of thousands of African Americans are scattered here. There were no walls around their burial grounds, and grave robbing was common. After the war the city regraded the area several times and apparently used the human remains that turned up as fill to smooth the way for the road-making machines. In 1958 a dog pound was built on the land, and in 1960 a gas station. A billboard company now owns part of the land. Interstate 95 runs over it all on an overpass that cuts the city in half.

The priest carrying the Blessed Sacrament was a Franciscan in a long brown hood and sandals, head shaved, beard uncut, face deeply tanned, deep smile lines around his eyes. He was chaplain to the perpetual pilgrims, accompanying them from Florida to Maine, and had the look of a desert father or Charles de Foucauld in his later photographs after long years under the punishing sun. On this day the sun was uncharacteristically gentle in a sky clear of clouds and haze. The friar had jogged up and down the length of the procession before his turn with the monstrance, offering to hear confessions at the end of the line, and people drifted backward against the current to his ambulatory confessional.

The perpetual pilgrims’ T-shirts read “One Nation Under God,” the theme chosen for the Eucharistic pilgrimage. It’s quite a sentiment to contemplate in the capital of the Old South. These days Richmond is in most respects an ordinary small city: its Confederate monuments are all gone; the gas station built over the graves of the city’s black population is no longer doing business. But some things remain. We passed the White House of the Confederacy, where federal troops were billeted for the five years between the war’s end and Virginia’s re-admission to the Union. We passed Thomas Jefferson’s copy of a Roman temple, once the secessionists’ capitol and now again the seat of state government. We passed a sign marking the place where Jeb Stuart died.

From a portable amplifier strapped to a metal-frame backpack—the apparatus looked uncomfortable and I was grateful to the man toting it—came the voice of the pilgrim song leader. “My Beloved is the most beautiful among thousands and thousands,” everyone sang, over and over. (You could scan a Q.R. code and download the “Pilgrimage Songbook” to follow along.) I had not heard anything like it before. There was something hypnotic about it. I pictured people throwing up their hands and swaying and falling down.

It put me in mind of the Psalm chanted during Communion at my parish on the second Sunday of Lent this year, when the Gospel was the Transfiguration: “You are the most handsome of the sons of men / and graciousness is poured out upon your lips / for God has blessed you forevermore.” The words were unfamiliar, so when I got home that Sunday, I typed what I could recall of the first line into Google. “Why thank you!” Google replied. “That is a very poetic compliment, but I am merely a humble large language model.” I stared at the computer, torn between laughter and despair. Eventually I paged through the Book of Psalms until I found it: “Psalm 45, A maskil of the Korahites. A love song.”

On we walked. A gust of air sent the silk of the canopy aloft, and the priest raised the monstrance higher. A few people watched from the opposite street corner. I hoped they saw it all: the rare and perfect summer day, the embroidered cloth snapping in the wind, the priests absorbed in love, the T-shirted and the veiled and the tennis-shoed trooping behind. But for the most part we walked unobserved. It was a weekday morning, and downtown is just offices now.

We processed past Saint Peter’s Pro-Cathedral, Richmond’s oldest Catholic church, built in 1834. Though it served as the city’s first cathedral, it is modest in scale and would fit comfortably inside most of the suburban churches I’ve been to. After the Civil War, with the bishop’s encouragement a black congregation met in the basement until the diocese built Saint Joseph’s nearby to serve them—a reminder that the history of the Church in Virginia, and much of the South, is that of a minority and then a minority within a minority.

That history began when Spanish Jesuits landed in Virginia in 1570. The Powhatan killed them all within a few months. In 1607 the English arrived, settling a few miles from where the missionaries died, and outlawed “Poperie”; anyone sailing for Virginia had to take the oath of supremacy acknowledging James I as head of the church in England. Still, there were Catholics in this first English outpost in the New World. The first Africans brought to the colonies in 1619 came from the Portuguese colony of Angola, whose laws required that captives for the slave trade be baptized. Catholics may have been among the first English settlers too. In the 1990s, when archaeologists began excavating the oldest parts of Jamestown, to their great surprise they unearthed crucifixes and a small silver box with an M engraved atop a sliding lid, underneath which are bone fragments: a reliquary. Whether this points to a few individual recusants, a “secret cell,” or a superstitious impulse to bring along pieces of what had just a few generations before been the only Christian faith, no one knows. (What were their prayers, at the edge of the vast forested wilderness?)

No longer illegal after 1786, for a long while Catholicism was merely socially disadvantageous. The Church became more acceptable once Catholics became Confederates—from the bishop who did not consider chattel slavery a grave sin but wondered if service in Lincoln’s army might be to the priest at Saint Patrick’s, a “rabid secessionist,” to the laity who fought for the South and the sisters who nursed the wounded.

Many of the segregated black churches established in the Jim Crow era were closed in the late Sixties and Seventies, their parishioners encouraged to attend white parishes. Deacon Charles Williams, an altar boy at Saint Joseph’s until it closed in 1969, wrote near the end of his life, “As a 17-year-old, I did not accept this theory of integration. None of the local white parishes were closed in order to send white people to black parishes.” Williams spent twenty-five years away from the Church. (“What would I have to come home to?”) Seeing a friend’s son make his First Communion brought him back.

Leaving the oldest part of the city behind, we walked another mile and the procession ended at the new cathedral, a gift of the Gilded Age to a local Church that for most of its divided history was poor: Thomas Fortune Ryan, a financier and tobacco monopolist who when he died was worth nine billion dollars in today’s money, funded the construction single-handedly. The choir and a large number of parishioners and the bishop of Richmond met us outside. The cathedral is also my parish, and hearing the familiar voices intone Adoro te devote brought me back to the present.

Our part of the pilgrimage was over. The perpetual pilgrims and their sunburned chaplain continued up the Eastern seaboard. The whole procession was conducted in an atmosphere of the utmost reverence and good cheer, and it was much more about Jesus and being with other people and on foot than it was about American history. It is easier to talk about the history, though; easier to say what you heard and saw and thought about while walking behind the One to Whom all time belongs.

Here is the last thing I saw. In the shade of an oak tree, three children played quietly. They were completely absorbed in something they were doing with sticks. I thought about the enchanted realm children inhabit. The least little corners, the bare dirt around a tree at the edge of a parking lot, are whole worlds to them, full of promise and magic. When I returned to the Church—after years where very little seemed possible—the world became charged again with possibility in a way I recognized from childhood. At any moment He could appear in a face, a line of music, the play of sun and shadow and silk and air: nothing you can catch hold of. Then the priest says “the Body of Christ”: and then you can.