Pilgrimage and the Therapeutic Processes of Spiritual Reintegration in Medjugorje: A Qualitative Exploratory Study.

Résumé

While much sociological literature interprets contemporary pilgrimage through fragmentation, commodification, and post-secular hybridity, this study argues that pilgrimage continues to function as a process of spiritual healing and reintegration-a space where transcendence and everyday life are dynamically reconciled. Drawing on Bauman's typology of late-modern identities-the Player, the Tourist, the Vagabond, and the Stroller-reinterpreted through the Deming cycle (Plan-Do-Study-Act) and the Thomistic framework of the cardinal virtues, the article proposes pilgrimage as a therapeutic pathway toward moral, relational, and existential wholeness. Based on qualitative fieldwork in Medjugorje (Bosnia and Herzegovina), including interviews with pilgrims (n = 20) and local residents (n = 11), one focus group, and comparative ethnographic observations in Čapljina as a control setting, the analysis shows how devotional and communal practices-hospitality, confession, fasting, and prayer-generate spiritual resilience and psychosocial wellbeing. Both pilgrims and hosts engage in practices that restore coherence and belonging amid social fragmentation, revealing pilgrimage as more than religious tourism: a lived process of healing the self and community. Integrating Bauman's typology with virtue ethics allows the four postmodern figures to be read as successive stages in a restorative cycle culminating in the Integrated Pilgrim-a person whose search for meaning unites action, contemplation, and ethical transformation. This framework situates pilgrimage within the discourse on religion and health, showing that sacred travel fosters a therapeutic completeness (beatitudo imperfecta) transcending consumerist and secular models of wellbeing.