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This Friday’s missionary hero is an American who lived in the Nineteenth Century. His name was Michael J. McGivney.
Michael was born in Waterbury, Connecticut on August 12, 1852 to Irish Catholic immigrants.
In 1873, young Michael was studying to be a priest at St. Mary Seminary in Baltimore, Maryland, but he had to leave the seminary to raise his siblings when his father died. When he finished raising his siblings, he returned to the seminary and was ordained in Baltimore as a priest of the Diocese of Hartford, CT on December 22, 1877. The man who ordained him was Cardinal James Gibbons.
As a young priest, Fr. McGivney saw the hostility that Irish Catholic immigrants faced on a daily basis. He saw how the dangerous working conditions in factories killed many fathers, making life very difficult for their surviving widows and children.
At the same time, he also saw the growth of fraternal organizations that did not accept Catholic members.
As a result of all he saw, twenty-nine-year-old Fr. Michael decided to do something to help those in need. As an Assistant Pastor of St. Mary Parish in New Haven, CT, he called together a group of men of the parish on October 2, 1881. He told the group that he would like to start a fraternal organization for Catholic men, complete with all of the symbols and rituals that other fraternal groups had. This fraternity would have as their patron, Christopher Columbus, a famous Catholic layman.
The organization that Fr. Michael proposed would not only be social in nature, but it would provide help to families of its deceased members. The men agreed, and in February 1882, the Knights of Columbus elected officers and became a formal association a month later.
Fr. McGivney wanted the Knights of Columbus to be a vehicle for Catholic men to grow in holiness. To do that, they would not only help the families of deceased members, they would also serve their parishes, communities, and the global church.
The vision of Fr. McGivney touched the hearts of the men of St. Mary Parish in New Haven in a very special way, and the Holy Spirit guided them. By 2020, there were over 16,000 Councils of the Knights of Columbus with almost two million members.
The Knights of Columbus have provided over a billion dollars to charity and given hundreds of millions of hours in humanitarian service. The Knights have built free medical and dental clinics in poor areas, stepped up to serve those stricken by hurricanes such as Katrina and Rita, cared for children disabled from the earthquake in Haiti, and worked tirelessly for children with disabilities.
Fr. Michael J. McGivney died of pneumonia at the age of thirty-eight on August 14, 1890. In 2020, Pope Francis permitted his beatification process to occur. Blessed Michael J. McGivney’s feast day is August 14th. If he is one day canonized, he will join six other North American Knights of Columbus, all of them Mexicans, to have been declared “Saint.”
