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!
First people lined up in Yonkers. Then in Harlem, Detroit, and Brooklyn. Always those lines led to the same man: Father Solanus Casey, the Capuchin wonder-worker.
Born Bernard Casey in 1870, the future priest grew up in a three-room log cabin with his parents and 15 siblings. With Morning and Evening Prayer said daily, a Rosary prayed nightly, and regular chores, life in that Wisconsin cabin wasn’t all that different from life in a monastery. Yet not until he was 21 (and had worked as a lumberjack, hospital orderly, prison guard, and streetcar operator) did Casey consider religious life.
At first, he pursued the diocesan priesthood. But the seminary he entered offered classes in only German and Latin. Speaking neither, Casey fell behind academically. When the rector suggested monastic life, Casey went to Detroit to study with the Capuchins.
He was finally ordained to the priesthood on July 24, 1904, but due to his ongoing academic struggles, his ordination was an ordinatio simplex, meaning he could say Mass but not preach publicly or hear confessions. Casey, however, was happy: He was a priest.
That fall, Casey took up his first assignment as sacristan and doorkeeper at Sacred Heart Parish in Yonkers, New York. There, the miracles began.
People would come to the monastery with some sort of trouble. Casey, as the doorkeeper, would greet them and talk with them. He would then enroll them in the Capuchin’s Seraphic Mass Association. With remarkable frequency, healing followed. Some days, the people who lined up to see Casey numbered more than 200.
In every city he served, the priest met with them all. For 53 years, Casey spent his days talking with visitors and his nights in prayer. By the time of his death in 1957, the Capuchins had filled seven notebooks with accounts of cancers cured, kidneys healed, limbs made whole, and infertility vanquished, all through the intercession of the man whom Pope Francis named “Blessed” on November 18, 2017. His beatification took place at Ford Field in Detroit before an estimated crowd of 60,000.
