Father Michael McGivney, the founder of the Knights of Columbus, will be beatified during a special Mass Oct. 31 at the Cathedral of St. Joseph in Hartford that will be livestreamed on this page.
The beatification Mass will be celebrated at 11 a.m. by Cardinal Joseph W. Tobin of Newark, New Jersey. Baltimore Archbishop William E. Lori, Supreme Chaplain of the Knights of Columbus, will participate.
Father McGivney prepared for the priesthood at St. Mary’s Seminary in Baltimore and was ordained at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary in Baltimore by then-Archbishop James Gibbons in 1877.
Archbishop Lori said Father McGivney was a visionary leader in creating the Knights organization as a life insurance company, because the priest saw the need to help families left destitute when the breadwinner died, as often happened in the 19th century.
“But he also saw the need, even more importantly, for men and their families to deepen their commitment to the faith, their knowledge of the faith and their participation in the faith,” the archbishop said. “So, he made the Knights a tremendous avenue for the spiritual growth of Catholic men and their families.”
He called Father McGivney a model parish priest who “knew his people” and “he loved them.”
“He enjoyed being with his people. He provided opportunities for spiritual growth, but also for families and parishioners to come together. He loved the poor and the outcast. He preached convincingly and beautifully,” said Archbishop Lori.
The archbishop said Father McGivney was “a Pope Francis priest before there was a Pope Francis,” a comment he said he thought the pope enjoyed when the board of the Knights met with him at the Vatican earlier this year and the archbishop presented a biography of the priest to the pope.
“Father McGivney has inspired generations of Catholic men to roll up their sleeves and put their faith into action,” Supreme Knight Carl A. Anderson said. “He was decades ahead of his time in giving the laity an important role within the church. Today, his spirit continues to shape the extraordinary charitable work of Knights as they continue to serve those on the margins of society as he served widows and orphans in the 1880s.”
Father McGivney, who will be the first American parish priest to be beatified and has long been a hero of working-class Catholics, can be viewed as a martyr of a pandemic. When he died of pneumonia complications at age 38 in 1890, it was during an outbreak of influenza known as the Russian flu in Thomaston, Connecticut. Some recent evidence, according to the Knights, indicates the outbreak may have been the result of a coronavirus.
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