Knights of Columbus brothers worldwide mark 133rd anniversary of Founder’s Day honoring Father Michael J. McGivney March 29

Members of the Knights of Columbus mark Founder’s Day this coming Sunday on March 29, honoring Father Michael J. McGivney, the assistant pastor at St. Mary’s Church in New Haven, who founded the order. Councils throughout the order are urged to observe this day – among their own members and with the community at large – as a reminder of what the Knights of Columbus has accomplished in the past years, the ideals of the order, and their own local achievements.

The Knights of Columbus is a Catholic fraternal benefit organization headquartered in New Haven, Connecticut. Its origins date back to an Oct. 2, 1881 meeting organized by Father McGivney.

Worried about the religious faith and financial stability of immigrant families, Father McGivney founded the Knights of Columbus with the help of several men of St. Mary’s parish to help strengthen the faith of the men of his parish and to provide financial assistance in the event of their death to the widows and orphans they left behind. He was also known for his tireless work among his parishioners. He was born in Connecticut in 1852 to parents who were natives of Ireland and immigrants to the United States.

Knights of Columbus brothers offer mutual aid and assistance to sick, disabled and needy members and their families. Social and intellectual fellowship is promoted among members and their families through educational, charitable, religious, social welfare, war relief and public relief works.

On Feb. 6, 1882, the first members chose Christopher Columbus – recognized as a Catholic and celebrated as the discoverer of America – as their patron. Late 19th century Connecticut was marked by Nativism and considerable hostility toward Catholic immigrants. Dating back to the Civil War in the 1860s, many American native Protestants – both inside and well beyond New England ­– wondered about the tide of immigrant Catholics, overwhelmingly Irish that had been immigrating to the United States. They questioned just how American – how real, pure, genuine American ­– were they? Father McGivney wanted to see established a lay organization that would in part discourage local Catholic men from entering secret societies whose membership was antithetical to Church teaching; to unite men of Catholic faith; and to provide for the families of deceased members.

As a very visible symbol that allegiance to their country did not conflict with allegiance to their faith, the organization’s members took as their patron Columbus. Within three years of the founding of the Knights of Columbus, the Hartford Telegram, on the occasion of an 1885 parade by the order in New Haven editorialized: “There are some narrow-minded people living in New England yet who imagine that the Irish race are idle, slovenly and often vicious” but the parade proved that “the second generation in this country are intensely American in their instincts, and they are forging ahead to prominent positions in commerce, trade and in the professions.”

The Knights of Columbus, made up of Father McGivney, Matthew C. O’Connor, Cornelius T. Driscoll, James T. Mullen, John T. Kerrigan, Daniel Colwell and William M. Geary, were officially chartered by the general assembly of the State of Connecticut on March 29, 1882, as a fraternal benefit society, and celebrate March 29 every year as Founder’s Day, with 2015 marking the 133rd anniversary. Today, the Knights of Columbus is the world’s foremost Catholic fraternal benefit society. The order’s founding principles are charity, unity and fraternity.

Father McGivney fell sick with pneumonia in January 1890 while serving as pastor of St. Thomas Church in Thomaston, Connecticut. After almost eight months of various treatments, while laboring to carry on his pastoral duties, he died on Aug. 14, 1890 two days past his 38th birthday.

Now Pope-emeritus Benedict XVI declared Father McGivney “venerable” on March 15, 2008, approving a decree of “heroic virtue.” The cause for sainthood for the Knights of Columbus founder, furthering his process toward possibly becoming the first American-born priest to be canonized, was launched in December 1997. The title “Servant of God” is permitted to be used once a formal cause for canonization is under way.  This title was given to McGivney in 1997, when the Vatican granted nihil obstat, meaning that it had found no objection to the advancement of the formal cause for canonization. In 2008, after the Congregation for the Causes of Saints made a positive judgment on the positio, then Pope Benedict XVI declared Father McGivney’s heroic virtue as a prelude to possible beatification and Father McGivney was given the title, “Venerable Servant of God.”

The positio is a printed volume stating the formal argument for the servant of God’s canonization. It includes a systematic exposition of the individual’s life. It also summarizes what any witnesses said during the diocesan phase of the investigation into the individual’s life. Father Gabriel B. O’Donnell, the vice-postulator for Father McGivney’s cause for sainthood, completed a two-volume positio that runs to nearly 1,000 pages. It includes both a biography and an essay on Father McGivney’s spirituality. The volume on Father McGivney’s spirituality is organized around his life of virtue – the theological virtues of faith, hope and charity, along with the cardinal virtues of prudence, justice, fortitude and temperance. Each chapter is followed by documents pertaining to Father McGivney’s heroic virtue.

The Knights of Columbus has grown from its humble late 19th century New England beginning to a place where today the order has more than 14,000 councils and 1.8 million members throughout the United States, Canada, the Philippines, Mexico, Poland, the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Panama, the Bahamas, the Virgin Islands, Cuba, Guatemala, Guam, Saipan, Lithuania, Ukraine and South Korea. Individual members can be found in other parts of the world, too. Bishop Prosper Balthazar Lyimo, consecrated last month as auxiliary bishop of the Archdiocese of Arusha in northern Tanzania in East Africa, has been a member of Knights of Columbus Thompson Council #5961 in Northern Manitoba, where he served briefly as chaplain, since April 3, 2012.

The Supreme Council in New Haven chartered Knights of Columbus Thompson Council #5961 with 59 charter members on May 6, 1967. Knights of Columbus Thompson Council #5961 was the 31st council in Manitoba to receive its charter. Bishop Lyimo served as the Thompson council’s chaplain until June 2012. Canada’s first Knights of Columbus council – Montreal Council 284 – was chartered on Nov. 25, 1897.

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Today marks the Oct. 9 Feast of St. Denis, patron saint of Paris, and one of the Catholic Church’s most famous cephalophore (a.k.a. head-carrier) saints

St. Denis, one of the Fourteen Holy Helpers, who sometime after 250AD was martyred but not before, according to the Golden Legend, miraculously is said to have picked up his severed head and preached a sermon with it in his hands while walking seven miles from Montmartre where he had been beheaded.

The Catholic Church, of course, when it investigated the story of St. Denis wanted to make sure the distance he walked with his head in his hands was correctly asserted as about seven miles. There was some suggestion it was only six miles. Now, that’s a true Catholic debate. Also honored along with Saint Denis today are his two companions, a priest named Rusticus, and a deacon, Eleutherius, who were martyred alongside him and buried with him.

Born in Italy, much of St. Denis’ life remains shrouded in the mists of history, and nothing is definitely known of the exact time or place of his birth in Italy, or indeed, of his early life.  St. Fabian, the 20th Pope, sent him with five other missionary bishops to Gaul  where the Church  had been persecuted under the Roman Emperor Decius.

Ascertaining the historical facts of St. Denis life hasn’t been made easier by the erroneous conflation in the Middle Ages of St. Denis of Paris with St. Dionysius the Areopagite, and with the Pseudo-Dionysius, the composer of the Areopagitic writings.

St. Denis was enrolled in the catalog of saints in 1568 by St. Pius V, performing what we might  today call  an “equivalent canonization,” a process established in 1632 by Pope Urban VIII. Until the formal canonization of St.  Udalric, Bishop of Augsburg, by Pope John XIV in 993,  sainthood was often more a matter of local rather than universal veneration within the Church.  St. Walter of Pontoise, also known as St. Gaultier, was canonized by Archbishop Hugh de Boves, archbishop of Rouen, in 1153, and was the last saint in Western Europe to have been canonized by an  ecclesiastical authority other than the Pope.

While the average time between the death of an eventual saint and canonization is 181 years and the Church usually uses a rigorous three-stage process where the Pope first declares the person a Servant of God; then Venerable; and then  Blessed, before they are canonized as a saint. Popes, however, from time-to-time use equivalent canonization to extend to the whole Church, without carrying out the ordinary process of canonization, the veneration as a saint, the “cultus” of someone long venerated as such locally, also known as “confirmation of cultus.” There are three conditions for such a canonization: an ancient cultus, a general constant attestation by trustworthy historians to the virtues or martyrdom of the person, and an uninterrupted fame as a worker of miracles. Pope Francis enrolled Angela of Foligno and Peter Faber in 2013 in the catalog of saints through equivalent canonization, as he did earlier this year adding José de Anchieta, Marie of the Incarnation and Francis-Xavier de Montmorency-Laval.