UNDERSTANDING THIS PILGRIMAGE
A St. Paul pilgrimage, often called a pilgrimage "in the footsteps of St. Paul," follows the Apostle to the Gentiles through Greece along the road the Acts of the Apostles records: from his landing at Neapolis (Kavala) to Philippi, Thessaloniki, Beroea (Veria), Athens and Corinth. Pilgrims read Acts 16 to 18 on the ground, and in each city the letter he later wrote to its church: Philippians, 1 and 2 Thessalonians, 1 and 2 Corinthians. Its purpose is the one Paul gave his own life: to know Jesus Christ, risen and living, and to be sent by Him.
The Catholic foundation: an apostle who points away from himself
The Catechism says that pilgrimages "evoke our earthly journey toward heaven and are traditionally very special occasions for renewal in prayer." A pilgrimage built around St. Paul has a particular claim on that sentence, because almost everything we know of him is a journey. About half of the Acts of the Apostles follows his roads and sea crossings, and thirteen letters of the New Testament carry his name. The Church reads from him at Mass on most Sundays of the year. To go where he went is to put places under words you have heard all your life.
The centre of his story is an encounter with a person. Teaching on the Damascus road, Benedict XVI said Paul was "not transformed by a thought but by an event, by the irresistible presence of the Risen One," and that the change "was not the fruit of a psychological process." That is the Catholic reason to make this pilgrimage. You are not touring the career of a religious genius. You are going to the places where the risen Jesus took hold of a man who had been hunting His disciples, and asking what He intends to do with you.
The popes have made this journey themselves. In May 2001 John Paul II travelled to Athens, Damascus and Malta on what the Holy See called a Jubilee pilgrimage "in the footsteps of Saint Paul the Apostle." In Athens he and the Orthodox Archbishop Christodoulos issued a common declaration "standing before the bema of the Areopagus," and in his homily there he said that Paul's speech "can be considered the very symbol of the encounter of the Gospel with human culture." Benedict XVI declared a Pauline Year from 28 June 2008 to 29 June 2009 for the two-thousandth anniversary of Paul's birth, asked for pilgrimages to the Apostle's tomb, and stressed its ecumenical dimension, since Paul belongs to every Christian. The Church keeps the feast of his Conversion on 25 January and honours him with St. Peter on 29 June.
The road through Greece: Acts 16 to 18
This pilgrimage has a script, and St. Luke wrote it. At Troas, on the coast of what is now Turkey, Paul saw in the night a Macedonian who implored him, "Come over to Macedonia and help us" (Acts 16:9). He sailed by way of Samothrace to Neapolis, today's Kavala, and went inland to Philippi, "a leading city in that district of Macedonia and a Roman colony." There, by a river outside the city gate, the Lord opened the heart of Lydia, a dealer in purple cloth, and she and her household were baptized. There too Paul and Silas were beaten with rods and jailed, prayed and sang hymns at midnight, and saw their jailer baptized with all his family before morning. The New American Bible calls the church at Philippi "the first Christian community in Europe."
From Philippi the road ran west through Amphipolis and Apollonia to Thessalonica, where Paul argued from the Scriptures in the synagogue for three sabbaths before he had to leave by night. At Beroea, now Veria, his hearers "received the word with all willingness and examined the scriptures daily." Taken on to Athens, he debated daily in the public square, was led to the Areopagus, and spoke of the altar he had seen inscribed "To an Unknown God." Some scoffed at the resurrection of the dead; a few believed, among them Dionysius and a woman named Damaris. Then came Corinth: a year and a half of tentmaking and teaching beside Aquila and Priscilla, a night vision in which the Lord told him, "I have many people in this city," and a hearing before the proconsul Gallio. He sailed for home from Cenchreae, Corinth's eastern port.
Bold Pilgrim's St. Paul pilgrimage is conceived as a purpose-built journey through these cities. No dated departures are currently announced. By default it keeps the order of Acts, north to south, because the order is the story: a call, a first small church by a river, a beating, a synagogue that searched the Scriptures, a hard day among the philosophers, and a long stay in a rough port city where the Church took root. The order is a default and not a rule; the same road can be travelled from Athens northward when the practical side requires it. The journey also pairs each city with its letter. Philippians, which Paul wrote from prison and which has been called "the letter of joy," is read at Philippi. The two letters to the Thessalonians are read in Thessaloniki; the first was occasioned by Timothy's report reaching Paul at Corinth, not long after he had left, and is commonly counted the earliest of his letters. The two letters to the Corinthians, with their teaching on the Eucharist, on charity and on the resurrection of the body, are read at Corinth. Acts 20 adds that on his third journey Paul came back through Macedonia, spent three months in Greece, and sailed from Philippi after the feast of Unleavened Bread, so the road north is his as well.
What Acts records, and what is shown on the ground
Acts records the events and the cities: the vision that called Paul to Macedonia, Lydia's baptism by the river at Philippi, the synagogue at Thessalonica, the Beroeans searching the Scriptures, the speech at the Areopagus, eighteen months in Corinth and the hearing before the proconsul Gallio. Gallio was proconsul between 51 and 53, which gives what Benedict XVI called "the most reliable date in the whole of his biography"; it rests on an inscription discovered at Delphi. The cities are real and can be visited. The exact riverbank, cell or platform usually cannot be proven.
The identifications made on the ground vary in strength. At Corinth the marble platform excavated in the forum is, in the excavators' own record, "thought to have corresponded" to the tribunal of Acts 18: a strong reading, held with a scholar's caution. At Athens the New American Bible notes that "Areopagus" may mean the Hill of Ares beside the Acropolis or the council named after it, which by Paul's day met in a colonnade in the marketplace below; pilgrims pray at the rock, where John Paul II stood in 2001, without needing to settle it. Acts speaks only of "the river" outside the gate of Philippi, so the stream where a modern Orthodox baptistery honours St. Lydia is a traditional identification, and the chamber shown beside the forum as Paul's prison is a water reservoir that came to be identified with it. The mosaic monuments at Kavala and Veria are modern memorials. Veria presents the steps kept in its monument as those from which Paul preached; that is local tradition.
Paul's road ends in Rome. Benedict XVI called the Letter of Clement, sent by the Church of Rome, the first explicit testimony to his death, and noted that ancient sources place it between the persecution of 64 and the year 68. His tomb is venerated beside the Ostian Way, beneath the papal altar of the Basilica of St. Paul Outside the Walls. In 2009 Benedict XVI reported that a probe into the sarcophagus found traces of purple linen with a design in gold leaf, and bone fragments that carbon-14 testing dated to the first or second century, a result that, in his words, "would seem to confirm the unanimous and undisputed tradition" that these are Paul's remains. He chose his verb carefully, and so should we. The story of three springs at Tre Fontane he traced to a fifth-century text and called the most legendary of the later accounts; and on whether Paul ever reached Spain he said plainly, "There is no certainty."
A Catholic pilgrimage in an Orthodox country
Greece is an Orthodox country, and almost everything on Paul's road is either an archaeological site in the care of the Greek state or an Orthodox church or monastery. The Catholic Church here is small. Pope Francis, speaking in Athens in 2021 in the cathedral named for Paul's convert Dionysius the Areopagite, told its clergy and religious to "consider your smallness a blessing." That smallness shapes the practical side of the pilgrimage, and it is better to know it before you go.
Mass arrangements in Greece are confirmed with the local Catholic Church before any itinerary is published. Until that has been done, this page names no church, altar or outdoor place for Mass and promises none.
Meteora is part of the journey as Bold Pilgrim conceives it, and it is named plainly for what it is. It has no connection with St. Paul. The monasteries on the rock pillars of Thessaly are Greek Orthodox; hermits settled there from about the eleventh century and the great houses were built in the fourteenth and fifteenth, some thirteen hundred years after Paul went down from Beroea to the sea. It is included for sound reasons. It lies between Macedonia and Athens and breaks a long day on the road, and it is a living house of Eastern monastic prayer, a tradition the Second Vatican Council asked Catholics to know and esteem. Visitors are guests of the monks and nuns. The day at Meteora is a visit to Orthodox Christians at prayer, and no part of Paul's road.
Ephesus, Patmos and the rest of Paul's world
Greece is the core of this pilgrimage, not the whole of Paul. Ephesus and Patmos form an optional extension, and each should be judged for what it is. Ephesus, on the Aegean coast of Turkey, is fully Pauline: he stayed there more than two years, and Acts 20 has him summon the presbyters of its church to nearby Miletus for his farewell. It is the natural extension of a Greek journey, since Acts brings him to Ephesus by sea from Corinth. Patmos is not Pauline at all. It is St. John's island, where John writes that he found himself "because I proclaimed God's word," and where, according to tradition, he dictated the Apocalypse in a cave now kept, with the monastery above it, by the Greek Orthodox Church. Patmos belongs to a wider journey of St. Paul and the early Church, alongside the seven churches of the Book of Revelation, and should be presented that way.
Both are usually reached from Greece by sea. A purpose-built journey would treat the sailing as the way to reach Ephesus and Patmos, not as the point of the trip.
Beyond the Aegean, Paul's story runs on to Malta, where Acts records his shipwreck, and to Rome, where a pilgrim who has followed him through Greece will want to finish one day. It also runs back to places that are not realistically open to American pilgrims at present. When this page was last checked, on 8 October 2026, the U.S. Department of State advised against all travel to Syria, which puts Damascus, the city of his conversion and baptism, out of reach. Its advisory for Turkey stood at the second of four levels overall but placed the south-eastern provinces, where Tarsus and Antioch lie, at a higher level. Greece stood at the lowest advisory level, and the Aegean coast of Turkey was not among the higher-level areas. Advisories change, so read the current ones before you plan.
