There is a quiet kind of courage in carrying someone else’s prayers halfway across the world. It is not the sort that draws attention, but it is the kind that endures, a reflection of faith lived out in small, deliberate acts.
For Stephen Tine, a senior at Xavier High School, that courage took shape this fall on cobblestone streets beneath the Tuscan sun and inside the towering basilicas of Italy. Through his parish, Blessed Michael McGivney Parish in New Haven, Stephen joined a group of forty pilgrims on a journey through Florence, Siena, Assisi, and Rome, a pilgrimage to celebrate the Jubilee Year of Hope.
Before he left, Stephen asked his Xavier community for something: their prayers. He gathered petitions from students, faculty, staff, and families, written fragments of hope, grief, and gratitude, and carried them across an ocean. It is an ancient tradition of the Church, bringing the intentions of others to holy places, and Stephen embraced it with quiet humility.
“We wanted to find a way to involve the school,” he said. “It felt right to bring Xavier with me in some way.”
Each day of the pilgrimage, the group celebrated Mass in a different church, in medieval towns and bustling cities, in sanctuaries filled with centuries of prayer. In Assisi, Stephen’s favorite stop, he walked the narrow stone streets and visited the tombs of St. Francis, St. Clare, and St. Carlo Acutis, praying for intentions that had been entrusted to him.
“It is such an old town with these enormous churches rising out of the hills,” he said. “To be able to celebrate Mass there, in one of the chapels beneath the Basilica of St. Francis, was incredible.”
The pilgrimage moved on to Florence’s Renaissance beauty, to Siena’s quiet devotion, and finally to Rome, where Stephen and his group visited the four major basilicas: St. Peter’s, St. Paul Outside the Walls, St. Mary Major, and St. John Lateran. The Holy Doors, opened only once every twenty-five years, stood before them, a reminder that faith is both ancient and alive, both universal and deeply personal.
“It is amazing to walk through those doors knowing they are only opened four times in a century,” Stephen said. “You can feel how special it is.”
Between moments of prayer, there were glimpses of history, the Sistine Chapel, the Colosseum, the Pantheon, but what stayed with him most was not the tourist landmarks. It was the sacred stillness of the churches themselves.
“You could tell they were built to glorify God,” he said. “They were like palaces, every detail meant to honor Him. You do not see that kind of scale or beauty much here.”
In one church, he stumbled upon the tomb of St. Monica, tucked quietly away. In others, relics and saints’ remains were so common that their presence felt woven into the daily rhythm of faith.
“It is everywhere,” he said, still marveling. “You walk into a side chapel, and there is a saint buried there. It is humbling.”
For eleven days, Stephen was the youngest pilgrim in his group, surrounded mostly by adults yet connected by purpose. He did not mind. “We were all there for the same reason,” he said. “There was always someone to talk to, someone to pray with.”
When he looks back years from now, perhaps at the next Jubilee Year, Stephen says he will remember the grandeur, yes, but also the meaning behind it: a journey that was not about distance but about connection.
“It is the idea that these churches, these places, were built to lift us closer to God,” he said. “And that I could bring the prayers of my community there, that is something I will always remember.”
In a world often too busy to pause, Stephen Tine took time to carry the hopes of others. He walked through centuries of faith, prayed in the silence of sacred walls, and left behind not footprints, but prayers.
And for that, the Xavier community, whose petitions now rest in Italy’s basilicas, is deeply grateful.