c. 1998 Religion News Service
HARTFORD, Conn. _ A campaign to have the Rev. Michael J. McGivney, the son of Irish immigrants and founder of the Knights of Columbus, proclaimed a saint has been officially set in motion by the Archdiocese of Hartford.
McGivney founded the Knights of Columbus, the Roman Catholic fraternal organization, in New Haven in 1882, and if the process successfully results in the priest’s canonization, it would give the flagging morale of American priests a real boost, according to Hartford Archbishop Daniel A. Cronin.”The untiring efforts (by McGivney) to provide for the spiritual and material welfare of his parishioners express the highest ideals of the priestly vocation,”Cronin said at a Dec. 10 ceremony officially kicking off the campaign.
Cronin’s assessment was seconded by the Rev. Gabriel O’Donnell, a Dominican friar who is postulator, or leader, of the campaign to make McGivney a saint.”Giving the sometimes negative view of the priesthood that one encounters today, Father McGivney would be a wonderful example of every parish priest,”O’Donnell said.
Not counting missionaries martyred in North America during the colonial era, the church has proclaimed only four saints from the United States: three women who founded religious orders, and a cleric, Bishop John Neumann of Philadelphia. A number of others have been proposed for sainthood.
O’Donnell, who has a doctorate in spiritual theology and taught in a Philadelphia seminary, won’t predict how long the process will take. It will undoubtedly be years, he said.
Cronin named a four-member theological tribunal and a two-member historical commission to pull together a biography of McGivney and to detail how he lived the Christian virtues to a heroic degree. The documentation, to be forwarded to Rome, will be the start of a rigorous examination of McGivney’s life by the Vatican’s Congregation for the Causes of Saints.”We have been getting ready for this moment,”O’Donnell said.
For a century, in fact.
Michael McGivney was born in Waterbury in 1852. He was the eldest of 13 children, six of whom died in infancy or childhood.
His father, Patrick, worked in a brass factory and died at age 47 in 1873, while Michael was studying for the priesthood.
After his ordination and assignment to St. Mary’s Church in New Haven in 1877, McGivney showed special empathy for families left destitute when fathers died or were killed in industrial accidents.
He took up his pastoral duties at a time when Irish Catholics were feeling beleaguered and discriminated against. The brash new immigrants were seen to be ruining neighborhoods. When St. Mary’s dedicated its new church in 1874, The New York Times reported that it”was a source of annoyance and injury to neighboring residents as it invaded the most exclusive homes of wealth and culture.” In 1881, McGivney assembled a group of Catholic men to organize a fraternal society to provide camaraderie in the face of anti-Catholicism, as well as inexpensive life insurance to protect widows and orphans. The organization was chartered as the Knights of Columbus by the state legislature on March 29, 1882.
Today, the organization counts nearly 1.6 million members in more than 11,000 councils throughout the United States, Puerto Rico, Canada, the Philippines and several Latin American nations. It has $6.3 billion in assets from its insurance business and is a major source of philanthropy within the Catholic Church. The organization reported contributing more than $106 million to charitable causes in 1996.
O’Donnell dismissed the idea that McGivney’s cause might receive special attention in Rome because a wealthy and powerful organization is backing it.”That’s said, but it isn’t true. It’s like an urban myth _ like the story of razor blades in apples at Halloween, which has never been authenticated,”he said.
Besides, he went on,”You can’t buy a miracle.” And miracles are integral to the process.
A miracle is taken as evidence the prospective saint enjoys God’s grace. In the Catholic view, a person may turn to those in heaven as easily as to earthly companions to ask them to”pray for me.”It’s not a case of praying to saints instead of to God, but to God through the saints.
A panel of physicians scrutinizes alleged miracles.”They will not say that a miracle occurred. All they can say is that there is no scientific way to explain the occurrence,”O’Donnell said.
O’Donnell said through the years people have reported they received”favors”after asking McGivney’s intercession. But until the reports can be investigated and verified, he won’t make them public.”I don’t want to jeopardize the process,”O’Donnell said.
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There are three steps to becoming a saint.
The first is the Vatican’s accepting that a candidate did indeed live a Christian life of heroic virtue and may be called”venerable.” Secondly, the pope beatifies the person, who is given the title”blessed”and declared to be worthy of imitation. This requires an uncontested miracle attributed to the candidate.
The third step, following the acceptance of a second miracle, is canonization as a saint, a papal pronouncement, considered to be infallible, that the person lived a truly holy life. The person is placed on the church’s universal calendar of saints _ individuals who lived by the precepts of Jesus and now are with him in heaven.
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In contrast to prospective saints such as Mother Teresa, there is a paucity of personal material about McGivney, who died at age 38 in 1890. All of his personal and business papers were lost in a flood. Anecdotes about his life are few, even in his family.
O’Donnell is undaunted about the lack of lore that would lend color to the life of the prospective saint.”The crucial thing for the question of canonization is not his papers but the holiness of his life, whether his works were fruitful in the life of the church,”the priest said.”Less than 10 years after his death there was devotion to him. There is lots of testimony to his holiness in the archives.” One testimonial on record came from a condemned man, James (Chip) Smith.
Smith, a 21-year-old Irishman, was convicted in 1881 of shooting and killing, while he was drunk, a New Haven policeman. McGivney visited the man daily to give him spiritual comfort. On the day Smith was to be hanged, McGivney’s grief was reported to be intense.
This time Smith comforted the priest, saying,”Father, your saintly ministrations have enabled me to meet death without a tremor. Do not fear for me. I must not break down now.” In 1900, 10 years after McGivney’s death, 5,000 knights from Brooklyn, N.Y., gathered at his grave in a family plot in Old St. Joseph’s Cemetery in Waterbury, Conn., to celebrate his life and legacy.
A now-defunct newspaper, the Waterbury Democrat, reflected the general attitude toward McGivney in its June 9, 1900, issue:”Although rather retiring in his disposition, he possessed an indomitable will and never was discouraged, no matter what obstacles might come in his way.”
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