Father McGivney

Father McGivney entered Saint-Hyacinthe’s Seminary in Saint Hyacinthe, Quebec, Canada in 1868. He finished his studies at St. Mary’s Seminary in Baltimore, Maryland in 1873, but had to leave the seminary and return home to help finish raising his siblings, due to the death of his father. He later returned to the seminary and was ordained a priest on December 22, 1877, by Archbishop James Gibbons at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

On February 2, 1882, while an assistant pastor at Saint Mary’s Church in New Haven, Connecticut, McGivney founded the Knights of Columbus with a small group of parishioners. McGivney died from tuberculosis on the eve of the Assumption in 1890, when he was only thirty-eight years old. The order now has over 1.7 million member families and thirteen thousand councils. During the 2004-2005 fraternal year, $134 million and 68 million man-hours were donated to charity by the order.

In 1996, the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Hartford opened an investigation into Father McGivney's life, with a stated goal of his beatification and canonization, or formal recognition by the Church of his sainthood. Fr. Gabriel O'Donnell, OP is the postulator of McGivney's cause, as well as director of the Fr. McGivney Guild. The diocesan investigation was closed in 2000, and the case was passed to the Congregation for the Causes of Saints in Vatican City. On August 7, 2007, in his homily at the Opening Mass at the 125th Supreme Convention of the Knights of Columbus, Tarcisio Cardinal Bertone pledged his assistance to this cause as Cardinal Secretary of State for the Holy See.

On March 15, 2008, Pope Benedict XVI approved a decree recognizing the heroic virtue of Fr. McGivney.^[2] The pope's declaration significantly advanced the process toward sainthood. The declaration allows Catholics to refer to McGivney with the title "Venerable Servant of God".

In honor of McGivney, the York Catholic District School Board in Ontario, Canada founded a school named Father Michael McGivney Catholic Academy in 1989. It is located in Markham and currently houses 1,400 students. A biography by Douglas Brinkley and Julie M. Fenster of Fr. McGivney, Parish Priest: Father Michael McGivney and American Catholicism was published by William Morrow and Company in 2006. The Catholic University of America is renovating and renaming a building McGivney Hall.

Saint Peter Claver (1580–1654) (Spanish: Pedro Claver) was a Jesuit who, due to his remarkable life and work, become the patron saint of slaves, of Colombia and of African Americans.

As new slaves arrived, Claver ran out to meet them, carrying food and clothes to the living and removing the bodies of those who had died. He cared for the weakest first and took the sick to a nearby hospital he had built. Using natives as interpreters, he then began sharing the Gospel with all who would hear. Having won their good will, he instructed and baptized them into the Faith. Claver dedicated his life to the service of these people, humbly caring for the lepers and those suffering from smallpox, cleaning their sores and consoling them when other were disgusted by their diseases. He and the slaves he ministered to would prepare great banquets to celebrate holy days; inviting and ministering to the lepers, slaves, and beggars.

The apostle was accused of indiscreet zeal, and of having profaned the Sacraments by giving them to "creatures" deemed to scarcely possess a soul, even though Pope Paul III had proclaimed in his encyclical Sublimis Deus that non-European peoples had souls and were eligible to receive the sacraments of the Catholic Church. Indeed, many found the sense of dignity Claver gave the slaves a dangerous thing. Despite the contempt for him among the merchant and landed classes, his efforts—which he continued until his death in 1654—were supported by the Jesuit Order. His work and writings, along with that of others such as the Dominican priest Bartolomé de las Casas, while broadly rejected in his time, laid the foundation for the eventual rejection of the institution of slavery by the Catholic Church and the European powers by the early 19th Century.

We laid aside our cloaks, therefore, and brought from a warehouse whatever was handy to build a platform. In that way we covered a space to which we at last transferred the sick, by forcing a passage through bands of slaves. Then we divided the sick into two groups: one group my companion approached with an interpreter, while I addressed the other group. There were two blacks, nearer death than life, already cold, whose pulse could scarcely be detected. With the help of a tile we pulled some live coals together and placed them in the middle near the dying men. Into this fire we tossed aromatics. Of these we had two wallets full, and we used them all up on this occasion. Then, using our own cloaks, for they had nothing of this sort, and to ask the owners for others would have been a waste of words, we provided for them a smoke treatment, by which they seemed to recover their warmth and the breath of life. The joy in their eyes as they looked at us was something to see.

This was how we spoke to them, not with words but with our hands and our actions. And in fact, convinced as they were that they had been brought here to be eaten, any other language would have proved utterly useless. Then we sat, or rather knelt, beside them and bathed their faces and bodies with wine. We made every effort to encourage them with friendly gestures and displayed in their presence the emotions which somehow naturally tend to hearten the sick."