By Katie Vasquez
Catholics are offering prayers for a man who served as a priestly example to the Knights of Columbus: Blessed Michael McGivney.
Brooklyn Bishop Robert Brennan celebrated Mass with the knights at the Co-Cathedral of St. Joseph in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, on Wednesday, August 14, to mark the feast of the New Haven, Connecticut parish priest who started the fraternal organization in 1882.
“We make our way now in the 21st century, to carry on the good work that he’s done, the good work he began,” Bishop Robert Brennan told Currents News. “He worked with these emerging communities, people who were struggling to get by, to make their way in this new land.”
More than 140 years and millions of members later, the knights are now praying for his canonization cause.
“That a second miracle attributed to his intercession may open the way for him to be proclaimed a saint of the universal Church. we pray to the lord,” Father Michael Gelfant, associate state chaplain of the New York State Council for Knights of Columbus, prayed.
Blessed Michael McGivney’s legacy has continued to this day, and Bishop Brennan says that’s in part because of the groundwork he laid.
“Michael McGivney, you might say, was a little bit ahead of his time,” said Bishop Brennan, “this was a lay run organization, which now is probably one of the strongest in the church, still devoted to the very same principles of protecting families, of building of faith communities, helping men to be good husbands and fathers.”