It’s said that the longest journey begins with a single step.

For Father Gary Graf and the Step Up Speak Out effort, the estimated 1.65 million steps he took on his pilgrimage from Pope Leo XIV’s childhood home in Dolton to the base of the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor are the beginning of an ongoing effort to encourage people of all faiths to respect and speak up for the dignity of all people, including immigrants.

The pilgrimage concluded with a Dec. 2 interfaith prayer service at the Mezzanine, 55 Broadway, that featured a New York children’s choirs and prayers from Jewish, Muslim and Christian leaders, as well as short videos from Chicago children describing their experiences and fear for their communities during a period of increased immigration enforcement.

The service included the reading and signing of “A Creed and Call to Action for the Common Good,” which, it says, was issued “on the dawn of the 250th year of the United States.”

During his concluding remarks at the service, Graf said, “My feet can rest, but my spirit cannot rest, not while immigrant children cry alone, not while families are torn apart, not while strangers — men, women and children, flesh and bone, heart and soul, passion and courage, holding families together in the midst of government-imposed fear — are treated as anything less than kin.”

In the days following the prayer service, Graf and Father Larry Dowling, moderator of Priests for Justice for Immigrants, were invited to attend a naturalization ceremony in New York and helped distribute the naturalization certificates to new citizens.

Then they attended Illinois Sen. Richard Durbin’s Washington, D.C., announcement of his reintroduction of the DREAM Act, which would give some young people brought to the United States as children without proper authorization a path to citizenship.

Graf’s 57-day walking pilgrimage began Oct. 6. Over the next eight weeks, he crossed into Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania and New Jersey before walking across the George Washington Bridge into Manhattan Dec. 1 with Dominican Father Brendan Curran.

For Graf, whose grandparents immigrated from Germany and Ireland through Ellis Island, his first look at New York across the Hudson River was “very emotional.”

The following day, he walked his last miles to Battery Park at the southern tip of Manhattan and boarded the ferry for Liberty Island.

Along the way, Graf said, he saw parts of the United States he had never been exposed to, rural areas where the population was almost entirely white and many residents can trace their heritage back to the Revolutionary War years or even before.

“It was just looking at rural America in a way I hadn’t seen before,” said Graf, who has spent almost his entire priesthood ministering to primarily Latino communities in the Archdiocese of Chicago. “Walking from farm to farm. Some of those farms were abandoned; some were full of life. The lack of diversity — there were weeks when I saw no person of color. It allowed me to look at the world through the eyes of the other.”

What he found, he said, were people whose hearts were not full of hate.

“I don’t think there’s a lot of hatred, but there’s the unknown element and the fear element that sometimes gets fed by what’s happening in our country right now, with what the administration is doing,” Graf said.

He said he engaged people in conversation, listening to their perspectives and sharing his reality of life in a major metropolitan area with immigrants from around the world.

He credited the team around him, including Dowling; public relations consultant Lauren Foley, chief operating officer and managing partner of Jasculca Terman Strategic Communications; and others who helped by mapping out a route and finding parishes and other places for him to stay and engage in conversation with people.

“There was not a great deal that was challenging,” said Graf, 67, who averaged about 17 miles a day and spent much of that time in prayer. “I knew a lot of people were praying with me and for me and I for them, with Lauren and Father Larry back here and Priests for Justice for Immigrants supporting me. Each visit that I made, whether it be a priest and staying in his rectory overnight, or just conversations, invigorated me. It just gave me more energy to keep going.”

Even a mishap in which a fall from a horse — one he was invited to ride when accompanying a priest in rural Indiana on a visit to parishioners — and several broken ribs barely slowed him down, he said.

The effort will be celebrated with a Dec. 28 benefit concert at 4 p.m. at St. Bartholomew Church, with proceeds going to families adversely affected by immigration enforcement.

The Step Up Speak Out pilgrimage was featured in many news outlets, online, in print and on radio and television, with Graf often speaking with reporters as he traveled.

Now Graf and Dowling said, they will turn their efforts toward keeping connections and building relationships with people Graf met along the way, along with encouraging more priests to speak out about what immigrant communities are experiencing.

The Step Up Speak Out website remains active, Dowling said, and he and Graf hope that it will become a place to foster interfaith connections.

Within the archdiocese and the Catholic community, they said, they plan to work directly to urge priests to “speak up and express ourselves.”