The Catholic Patriotic Minute #20: Blessed Solanus Casey
Catholics For Catholics Special Edition | November 17th, 2025
Blessed Solanus Casey: A Life Lived Fully in God’s Divine Love
On November 18, 2017, Blessed Solanus Casey became the second priest born in the United States to be beatified. Blessed Solanus’s complete participation in God’s love by serving the poor and sick began when he first encountered this divine love in the rosary and Holy Sacraments.
Solanus “Barney” Casey was born to an Irish family near Oak Grove, Wisconsin, on November 25, 1870. His parents met at a Fourth of July picnic in Maine in the year 1860, married in 1863, and raised sixteen children. The Casey children spent their time playing outside, ranging from skating and swimming to hunting and fishing. Barney and his nine brothers made up their own baseball team, the Casey Nine.
Barney’s mother taught him to pray the rosary, a practice that became a daily one throughout Barney’s life. His faith deepened even more when he prepared for his First Holy Communion and became dedicated to reading the Holy Bible. At a Midnight Mass, young Barney started to consider becoming a priest one day. At the age of twenty-one, Barney joined St. Francis de Sales Seminary in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Although he was devoted to his studies for the diocesan priesthood, Barney struggled. His spiritual director recommended that Barney look at the orders of the Capuchins, Franciscans, and Jesuits.
All three orders invited Barney, but he was unsure. He asked his mother and sister to pray the Immaculate Conception Novena together to help with his discernment. On the ninth day of the novena, on the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, Barney heard Mother Mary say, “Go to Detroit,” where the Capuchins were rooted. He arrived at St. Bonaventure Monastery on Christmas Eve of 1896, just in time to attend Midnight Mass.
On January 14, 1897, Barney received the name Friar Francis Solanus, named after Saint Francis Solano, a priest who cared for poor children and played the violin for them. Solanus continued to struggle with his studies despite his efforts, and so in July of 1904 Solanus’s superiors came to the conclusion that he would be ordained a “simplex priest,” a priest who cannot be a confessor and cannot give sermons on doctrine. Father Solanus Casey submitted.
For the following twenty years, Father Solanus served in New York, first at Sacred Heart in Yonkers, then at Our Lady of Sorrows Parish in Manhattan on the Lower East Side, and lastly at Our Lady Queen of Angels Parish in Harlem. As a simplex priest, he participated as a sacristan, director of altar servers, and as the doorkeeper or porter, waiting at the door and welcoming all visitors to whom he attended from nine in the morning to nine in the evening. These visitors came to love Father Solanus and requested his spiritual direction. When he was not serving New Yorkers, Father was praying in Adoration before the Blessed Sacrament, playing Irish hymns with his violin in the chapel, or filling notebooks with his reflections on the Holy Eucharist, the Blessed Mother, surrendering to God’s will, humility, and gratitude.
In fact, during his homily in the Mass of the Beatification of Blessed Solanus, Cardinal Angelo Amato said, “[t]he prayer Deo gratias was frequently on his lips. Actually, he exhorted people to thank the Lord before making every request; this in order to commit Him all the more to answering it. He used to say that confidence in God produces serenity and joy, and takes away trouble and sorrow. Trust in God dispels darkness and opens the horizon of hope in eternal blessedness in heaven.”
While Father Solanus served in Harlem, he considerably contributed to the efforts of the Seraphic Mass Association, known today as the Solanus Mission Association, which financially aided Capuchin foreign missionaries. People, who enrolled in the association with a donation, would be prayed for in Masses of Capuchins worldwide. Some friars realized that the people, whom Father Solanus enrolled in Harlem, would receive answers to their prayer intentions. Some even experienced cures! At the direction of another friar, Father Solanus recorded these graces from God, and by the year 1956 he listed over six-thousand favors from God.
Father Solanus once stated that his two loves were “the sick and the poor,” and he served them more fully in his next assignment. In 1924, Father Solanus returned to Saint Bonaventure Monastery in Detroit to serve as the porter for the next twenty years. As the doorkeeper, he would welcome those suffering into the monastery kitchen for meals. When the Great Depression arose in 1929, Capuchin friars–inspired by Father Solanus–began the Capuchin Soup Kitchen, which still runs today.
In addition to his ministry for the poor and sick, Father Solanus provided spiritual direction to families impacted by World War Two between the years 1941 and 1945. However, in 1946, because of his sickness due to eczema spreading all over his body, Father was assigned to the Friary of St. Felix in Huntington, Indiana, where he continued to attend to the poor and sick. He returned to Detroit to be hospitalized in 1956 due to a skin infection. In July 1957, Father Solanus was nearing death. On his death bed, he told a priest, “I looked on my whole life as giving, and I want to give until there is nothing left of me to give. So I prayed that, when I come to die, I might be perfectly conscious, so that with a deliberate act I can give my last breath to God.” On July 31, 1957, the fifty-third anniversary of his first Mass, Father Solanus uttered, “I give my soul to Jesus Christ,” submitting to God with the gratitude and love that marked his life.
On November 18, 2017, Pope Francis beatified Blessed Solanus Casey. Sixty years before, at Blessed Solanus’s funeral Mass, Father Gerald established that Father Solanus had “a divine love for people. He loved people for what he could do for them – and for God, through them.” Father Solanus came to know of this divine love in five ways, according to his own journal. His five ways to grasp God’s divine love were: detachment from earthly desires, meditation on Christ’s Passion, uniformity with God’s will, mental prayer through meditation and contemplation, and simply praying for intentions. May more Catholic Americans come to know and participate in this divine love, just as Blessed Casey Solanus did.
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