A holy priest and prayerful porter in the house of God

July 30th is the feast day of Blessed Solanus Casey, a Capuchin friar who died in 1957 and who has a strong chance of becoming the first man in the United States to be declared a saint by the Church. He had humble beginnings in the Midwest, born in his family’s three-room log cabin like a character out of American folklore.

Yet Bl. Solanus is no tall tale, but a man of flesh and blood whose very humility put him in relationship with God in a profound way.

The future blessed was born on November 25, 1870, and baptized Bernard Francis Casey, named after his father and given the nickname Barney. He was the sixth of what would be sixteen children, born to Irish Catholic immigrants from the time of the Potato Famine. At the time of Barney’s birth, his father had become a farmer in a small Wisconsin town not too far from the northern stretch of the Mississippi River and the border with Minnesota. He grew up with the rough and tumble life and closeness to nature held by many farm boys. When he was eight years old, diphtheria claimed the life of two of his sisters and so afflicted him that, even though he recovered, his voice ever after was weak and wispy.

At age sixteen, Barney went to find work in Minnesota in an effort to help his family’s financial situation. At various times, he worked in a lumberyard, a brick factory, a state prison, and as a driver on one of the nation’s first electric streetcar systems. He courted a young woman whose family lived near his parents, though the girl’s mother put a stop to a possible engagement. While a streetcar driver in the town of Superior, Wisconsin, he would witness an event that would change the course of his life. He braked his car because of a disturbance on the tracks, only to see a scene where a man had murdered a woman in a drunken rage.

The encounter with violence and death woke something in the young man of twenty-one. He spoke to his parish priest about what he needed to do to become a priest. He was sent to the diocesan minor seminary in Milwaukee, where he attended classes with boys several years younger than he was. The classes were taught in either Latin or German, and that fact, combined with his own spotty grade school education, made the academics of seminary a challenge for Bernard. The superiors felt that he did, in fact, have a vocation, but they suggested that he pursue a vocation as a religious rather than a diocesan priest. While praying a novena before the feast of the Immaculate Conception, the young man received what he considered an interior locution from the Blessed Virgin, who told him, “Go to Detroit.”

Detroit meant the novitiate of the Capuchins, one of the religious communities he had written to. This branch of the Franciscan family was only newly settled in the United States, and Bernard was unsure about some of the congregation’s austerities, but he obeyed the voice and took the train to Detroit, where he received the habit on January 14, 1897, as well as the name Solanus. He was named after the Franciscan missionary to the New World, St Francis Solanus. It took him less time than he had feared to adjust to the schedule of Capuchin life. As a Midwestern American used to making his own way in the world, a much harder lesson to learn was how to rely on the will of God instead of his own. Yet the twenty-six-year old resolved to strive to unite himself to God through a life of prayer and meditation on the Passion of Christ, according to the Capuchin way of life.

But academics still proved a challenge. For a time, it seemed that he would be only a lay brother in the order, but at last his superiors permitted him to be ordained as a priest “simplex,” that is, one forbidden to preach at any Mass he would say or to administer the sacrament of Confession. He was ordained on July 24, 1904, and a few days later assigned to one of the Capuchin’s parishes near New York City. Yet because of the limits imposed at his ordination, his duties were limited to those of a sacristan and supervisor of the altar servers, duties usually assumed by a lay brother. In 1906, at age thirty-five, he was also made the community’s porter.

Regardless of which Capuchin friary he served in, Fr Solanus would remain in the role of porter throughout his life.

As the porter, Fr Solanus served as the go-between between the other friars and the outside world. It was his responsibility to sign for packages, to announce visitors, and to interact with those requesting help from the community. Though the visitors did not understand why a priest was serving in this role, many came to respect his welcoming, cheery disposition, his listening ear, and his earnest counsel. His advice was usually very simple, connected to the twin virtues of gratitude and trust. He would counsel the visitors to thank God for the blessings they had already received from His hand, to thank Him for future blessings, and to offer some small sacrifice in response.

Little by little, visitors who spoke to Fr Solanus found that their prayers were answered. The sick got better. Estranged or difficult spouses reconciled. The unemployed found work. Alcoholics stopped drinking. Obstacles to religious vocations disappeared. His superiors made him responsible for enrolling members in the Seraphic Mass Association, whereby laymen could offer a small stipend for Mass intentions where the friars would pray for the layman, and the stipend would help fund the spiritual and charitable works of the Capuchins. Visitors would return to Fr Solanus, sometimes with tears of gratitude in their eyes, and the priest would remind them that the entire community of friars had been praying, and regardless, thanks were due to God alone.

His superiors and fellow friars did not always understand this unique calling. When he returned to friary in Detroit as “assistant porter,” he could spend as much as eighteen hours a day counseling visitors and praying with them. In Detroit, he was also put in charge of a weekly healing service where he would offer prayers, a few inspirational remarks, and then bless the attendees with a relic of the True Cross. When the Great Depression hit, the Capuchins of Detroit organized one of the first soup kitchens in the United States, with Fr Solanus one of its leaders. He would not only serve the hungry with his own hands but also counseled those of his visitors still with means to donate to the cause of “feeding the hungry” (which is one of the works of mercy taken from Matthew 25). There are several accounts in Fr Solanus’s biography that suggest that there were times the only way the soup kitchen could keep functioning was thanks to his prayers and his unwavering trust in Divine Providence, a trust that sometimes was answered in ways at least bordering on the miraculous.

At the height of his activity, Fr. Solanus would speak to between 150 and 200 people a day. The priest was not entirely comfortable with such “celebrity,” wanting to spend more time in prayer and conversation with God, time granted only during occasional illnesses. When he was well, he was back to blessing and counseling visitors. At age 75, his superiors sent him to the most rural friary in the US province, intending him to take some much-needed rest. He still kept up a lively correspondence, however, and a celebration in Detroit in honor of his golden anniversary as a Capuchin allowed many of his devotees to track him down in his current place of residence.

In the last years of his life, he suffered from a painful skin condition (a bacterial infection), especially in his legs, though he never complained. The last year or so of his life, he returned to Detroit, where he could find better care for his condition. He died there at St Bonaventure’s Friary on July 31, 1957, four months shy of his eighty-seventh birthday. Some 20,000 people paid their respects to his remains before his funeral.

With his fellow friars, he tried to have as normal a life as his fame permitted, engaging in their recreation as much as his health permitted. He was well known for playing the violin, as well as playing it poorly. There is something profoundly Franciscan in his custom of serenading the Christ Child in the chapel after Christmas Midnight Mass year after year. In spite of his limitations (or, given that we worship a God who delights in exalting the humble, perhaps because of them), he was a model Capuchin Franciscan. His cause for canonization opened in 1976. Pope John Paul II declared him venerable on July 11, 1995. With the approval of a miraculous cure attributed to his intercession, Pope Francis authorized his beatification, which took place on November 18, 2017, in Ford Field, with Cardinal Amato presiding on the pope’s behalf.

Blessed Solanus Casey is that he is not the only example of a holy porter or doorman. In North America, one might think of St. André Bessette, the simple lay brother in the Congregation of the Holy Cross known for his healings and his devotion to St. Joseph. Much of his religious life, Brother André was also the porter for his community. (St. André and Bl. Solanus even met once, each asking the other for a blessing.) But many other saints have held this role, either for a short time (it was one of the assignments of St Faustina Kowalska) or for long stretches of their religious life (such as St Conrad of Parzham). For some reason, Franciscans and Jesuits seem to have been especially blessed with porter saints, though these are usually lay brothers and not priests like Bl. Solanus.

Why would God grant us so many holy porters?

The Rule of St Benedict devotes an entire chapter on the role of porter. The characteristics there are an extension of the general principle that guests to the community are to be treated as if they are Christ. Thus, the porter is supposed to respond especially to the poor with the love of God. In addition to the Rule of St Benedict, I also think of Psalm 84:10: “For a day in your courts is better than a thousand elsewhere. I would rather be a doorkeeper in the house of my God than dwell in the tents of wickedness.”

A porter holds a liminal role, facing both God and neighbor. In holy porters like Bl. Solanus, we see men and women who become shining examples of the mercy of God extended to those in need. The advice that Bl. Solanus offered those who came to him was not complicated: pray, offer sacrifices, thank God in all things. Yet thanks to his own prayers and sacrifices and Eucharistic spirit, God was able to do great things through Bl. Solanus. God exalts the humble. Love of God and love of neighbor are simply two modalities of the same love.

We see this encapsulated beautifully in the collect for his feast today:

O God, who in your providence
conformed Blessed Francis Solanus Casey to the image of your Son
making him tireless in the service of the poor,
by his intercession and example,
grant also to us the same generosity and joy
in giving of ourselves in service to our neighbor.
Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son,
who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, forever and ever.
Amen.

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