ATTR: "Trinidad, Colorado - Knights of Columbus sign" By Joe Mabel, CC-BY-SA-2.0, via Flickr.
NOTE: Enjoy this excerpt from The American Daily Reader, by CatholicVote president Brian Burch and Emily Stimpson Chapman. To order the complete volume, visit the CatholicVote store today!
The men weren’t coming to Church. Father Michael J. McGivney could see that clearly enough from the pulpit every Sunday. In 1882, in the pews of his Connecticut parish, women and children abounded, but men were few.
McGivney knew the danger for families and communities that would follow as men drifted away from the Faith. He also recognized the danger for the men themselves, who were instead gravitating toward saloons and anti-Catholic fraternal societies such as the Freemasons. At the same time, McGivney was also concerned with the parish’s widows and children, who were often left impoverished by the sudden death of the family breadwinner.
As a young man, that same fate had nearly been McGivney’s. His father’s death in 1873 forced him to leave seminary to care for his mother and six younger siblings. If not for the generosity of his sister’s new husband, who helped pay Mrs. McGivney’s bills after their wedding, and the Diocese of Hartford, which paid his way through seminary (something rarely done at the time), McGivney never could have pursued the priesthood.
To both bolster the declining faith of men and help the impoverished bereaved, McGivney decided his parish needed to form its own fraternal society, something that could connect men more closely to the Church through brotherhood and faith formation, while at the same time offering life insurance and sick benefits to its members.
With a small group of parishioners by his side, the 29-year-old assistant pastor founded the Knights of Columbus in the basement of St. Mary’s Church, New Haven, in March 1882. The term “Knights” was meant to call the men on to greatness, while “Columbus” celebrated America’s Catholic roots.
By the time McGivney died of pneumonia on August 14, 1890, the Knights of Columbus had grown to 6,000 members. Today, it has nearly two million members. McGivney’s cause for canonization was opened in 1997, and he was declared “Venerable” in 2008. He was beatified at St. Joseph’s Cathedral in Hartford, Connecticut, on October 31, 2020.
