The Trip of a Lifetime: Ignatius Students' Journey to Milan and Rome

It was to be a youth pilgrimage, a sacred journey to celebrate a holy teenage boy from Milan, Italy, whom the Church was to canonize as a saint. But when on Easter Monday the Holy Father succumbed to a long battle with illness and breathed his last, the focus of our pilgrimage changed: from celebrating a young saint-to-be named Carlo to bidding a fond farewell to a shepherd of souls named Francis.  
 
A little background first: 
 
Back in late 2024, the date was set for the canonization of Blessed Carlo Acutis, who died of leukemia at the age of fifteen. Carlo attended the Jesuit high school in Milan— Istituto Leon XIII High School—back in the early 2000s. It isn’t every day that a student from a Jesuit high school reaches sainthood, so Carlo’s high school sent out an invitation to Jesuit high schools all over the world to celebrate the momentous occasion with them, first in Milan, then in Rome for the canonization Mass at the Vatican. We eagerly accepted the invitation, thinking, “When would be the next time a student from a Jesuit high school will be canonized by a Jesuit pope?”  Dr. Fior and I selected six Ignatius students to join over 200 other students from Jesuit high schools all over the world, including one school from Albania, several from France and Italy, and one from Croatia.  There was even supposed to be students from a school in Congo, but trouble securing visas prevented them from joining us for the late-April festivities.  
 
Wednesday, April 23: Van Drive to Detroit and Flight to Milan
It’s a sunny morning, and our students feel a bit like celebrities as local Cleveland media stations train their cameras and microphones on them. The reporters ask them to comment on the original purpose of the trip and what it was turning out to be with the death of Pope Francis.  After hugs and kisses from their moms and dads, we boarded a school van and headed to Detroit to catch our outbound flight to Milan.
 
Thursday, April 24: Welcome to Milan! Intro to Bl. Carlo Acutis
After connecting in Frankfurt, we board a flight to Milan, the first stop on our journey. A 30-minute train ride from the Milan airport brings us to the Milan train station near central Milan, where representatives whisk us off to host the school, Istituto Leon XIII. The lobby commons of the school is abuzz with the high energy of hundreds of teenagers and teacher/administrator chaperones. Photos, name tags and lanyards, and hospitality kits are passed out, and host students show our guys to their sleeping quarters (cots arranged in the hallways of their school).  Nice to see two other U.S. Jesuit high schools from the U.S.:  Regis High School in Manhattan and Fordham Prep in NYC. Even before we departed for Italy, Dr. Fior and I were impressed with how well organized and communicative the reps from Istituto Leon XIII were with us. 
 
After a hearty dinner in their cafeteria (chicken and really good pasta – what else?), we gather in their auditorium for a formal welcome (“Benvenuto!”), and a roll call of schools. We all then take a short walk down the street to the parish church where Carlo and his family belonged. After a prayer service there at the Church, we gather again in the auditorium to learn more about Carlo.  Two of his teachers give personal testimonies about Carlo, and even Carlo’s mother, Antonia Salzano, appears on Zoom to share her perspective on her son’s normal but holy life. From all of them, we learn that while Carlo had a penchant for gaming and creating videos with his peers, he was also a young man of uncommon spiritual depth, and saw Eucharist as central in his life. 
 
Friday, April 25: A Day in Milan and an Overnight Journey to Rome
After an early breakfast and wake-up, we gather in the school’s beautiful chapel for a 9 a.m. Eucharist before heading off on a walking tour of Milan. We walk through a large park to see the Arch of Victor Immanuel, as well as a huge fortress that was renovated in the 19th century. From there it’s on to the city center where we see the famous Duomo, an architectural marvel dedicated to the birth of Our Lady. Such a beautiful city! We return to Istituto Leon XIII in the mid-afternoon for some fun and games, snacks, and showers. Dinner at 6 p.m., then we prep for a 9 p.m. departure on an all-night bus trip to Rome. Not a terribly comfortable seven-hour ride on the coach bus, and none of us got more than a few winks of sleep, but the excitement of traveling to the Eternal City helped the hours pass quickly enough.  
 
Saturday, April 26: The Pope’s Funeral and Some of the Sites of Rome
Our coach bus rolls into Rome around 5:30 a.m., and we are dropped off just outside St. Peter’s Square, where we wait for three hours with the giant crowd to be let in. A light morning mist burns off as the sun begins to rise in the east. Three checkpoints and a security checkpoint stand between us and a choice spot in St. Peter Square for the papal funeral, which we manage to find somewhere between the obelisk and one of the fountains, maybe 80 yards away from the altar platform. By now, it’s 8:30 a.m., a full hour and a half before the start of the funeral. High clouds give way to bright morning sun and a light breeze. Foreign dignitaries dressed in black, cardinals donning red vestments, and orthodox bishops in white and gold vestments are seated to the right of the altar. Hundreds of concelebrating priests in white albs and red stoles are seated in the large section in front of us. The funeral Mass begins at precisely 10 a.m., with tolling of a solitary bell and the procession of even more cardinals emerge from behind a huge red drape behind the altar. The cardinals are followed by the pallbearers dressed in black suits and white gloves, bearing Pope Francis’ sealed wooden casket. The presider, Giovanni Cardinal Battista, preaches a homily (in Italian) in tribute to Francis' personal approach to the papacy, his emphasis on the poor and marginalized of the world, and his call for us to be better stewards of the earth. The final commendation is prolonged by specially chanted prayers by the orthodox bishops before the pallbearers, amid clouds of incense, hoist the papal casket upon their shoulders and carry it slowly into St. Peter’s Basilica. Thunderous applause and cheers erupt from the crowd as we tearfully catch one last glimpse of the casket. From there, a funeral cortege conveys the body of Pope Francis, in slow procession, to the nearby Basilica of St. Mary Major for burial. R.I.P
 
It takes the better part of an hour to make our way out of St. Peter’s Square. In our exit, we run into Fr. Kevin Klonowski ’07, as well as Fr. Eric Garris, both of the Diocese of Cleveland and working on degrees in preparation for teaching careers in our seminary in Cleveland. Our group found our way to a nice Roman café where we enjoyed pranzo (more good pasta!) before a short walking tour of some Jesuit sites in Rome, including The Church of San Ignazio.  
 
At 5 p.m., we recoup our energies and meet up with a Jesuit scholastic of the Midwest Province named Taylor Fulkerson, S.J. who takes us on a tour of The Church of the Gesu and the Rooms of St. Ignatius. Our students can hardly believe we’re actually in the rooms where St. Ignatius spent his last twelve years of life leading the Society of Jesus before taking his final breath in this very space. We celebrate Mass there, just the eight of us, praying for our loved ones back home and the famed Alma Mater we love.  
 
Our twelve-hour day in Rome ends with a 25-minute train ride to the Jesuit high school in Rome, Istituto Massimo. There, our entire group of students and chaperones gathered to be hosted by the Roman school. As we did in Milan, students settle into their sleeping quarters (gym floor in sleeping bags for the students, guest rooms in the Jesuit community for us adults). We enjoy a warm dinner provided by the school in their cafeteria before turning in exhausted—the end of a very full day in Rome that none of us will ever forget.   
 
Sunday, April 27: Bus Ride Back to Milan
We wake at 7:30 a.m. for showers and breakfast, and we gather for one final Eucharist together.  We express our gratitude to the host school in Rome and board coach buses for what is normally a 7.5-hour ride that turns out to be a 12-hour bus ride back to Milan. Traffic all over Italy is particularly heavy today with travelers returning from a three-day holiday after Friday’s observation of Liberation Day, commemorating the end of World War II. Also, traffic from the papal funeral and families returning from Easter Week holidays away makes our bus ride three hours longer than it otherwise would have been, getting us into Milan around 9:45 p.m. To say the least, we were one bunch of weary Wildcat travelers, yet nothing but grateful for the experience of a lifetime. Tomorrow would be an 8.5-hour flight to Newark, then another two-hour flight back to Detroit, then a 2.5-hour van ride home to Cleveland.  
 
Monday, April 28: Flight from Milan to Newark, Drive from Newark to Cleveland
Flight from Milan to Newark goes smoothly (early afternoon arrival), but the connection from Newark to Detroit gets delayed not once, not twice, but three times) before it gets cancelled altogether in the early evening. Ugh! Rebooking was far from reasonable to get us home so the boys could be in school the next day, so Dr. Fior and I made an executive decision: rent a vehicle for us to drive 8.5 hours from Newark back to Cleveland that night, with an ETA of 1:45 a.m. You can bet we were downing a lot of Dunkin coffee through that drive! But we were all in good spirits, with lots of laughter through the long drive home, reminiscing about our adventures on a trip to Milan and Rome, none of us will ever forget.

This story was originally published in the Spring issue of the Saint Ignatius magazine; to read the full issue click here.