Blessed Solanus Casey (Bernard Francis Casey, O.F.M. Cap.)

Life

Bernard Francis Casey was born on 25 November 1870 on a farm in Oak Grove, Wisconsin, the sixth of sixteen children of Irish immigrants who had fled the Famine. He worked as a lumberjack, prison guard and streetcar conductor on the rough frontiers of the American Midwest before sensing a call to the priesthood.

After struggling with the Latin and German required at the diocesan seminary in Milwaukee, he was advised that he might fare better in a religious order. In 1897 he joined the Capuchin Franciscans at Detroit, receiving the religious name Solanus after Saint Francis Solanus, a Spanish Franciscan missionary to South America. He was ordained on 24 July 1904 - but as a 'simplex' priest, restricted from preaching doctrinal sermons or hearing formal confessions because his superiors did not consider his theological training sufficient.

Far from frustrating his ministry, that restriction shaped it. Assigned as porter - the friar who answers the door - he spent over fifty years at the doorways of Capuchin friaries in Yonkers, Manhattan, Brooklyn, Huntington and finally Detroit, listening to anyone who came for help. He was known for his gift of counsel, his unshakable confidence in divine providence ('Blessed be God in all His designs'), and a remarkable number of healings and answered prayers.

During the Great Depression he helped found, in 1929, the Capuchin Soup Kitchen on Mount Elliott Street in Detroit, which has fed the city's poor without interruption ever since. He was also a self-taught violinist who loved to play Irish airs for his brother friars after supper.

He died at Saint John Hospital in Detroit on 31 July 1957. Declared Venerable in 1995 by Pope John Paul II, he was beatified by Pope Francis on 18 November 2017 at Ford Field in Detroit before a congregation of 60,000.