Father Solanus Casey’s beatification

Editor’s note: Bismarck resident, Patti Armstrong, grew up around Detroit. She was present for the beatification Mass there in November .
 
Sixty years after the death of Father Solanus Casey, the city of Detroit witnessed a confirmation of his holiness. On Nov. 18, more than 60,000 people gathered at Ford Field, home of the Detroit Lions, for his beatification.
 
The arena was transformed into a sacred space for the Mass. Overhead on the giant screen was a portrait of the thin, scraggly-bearded Capuchin priest. God does indeed lift up the lowly.
The Vatican’s Apostolic Nuncio, Cardinal Amato concelebrated with four cardinals, 28 bishops and almost 300 priests. Paula Medina Zarate, a retired schoolteacher from Panama, carried up a relic of Blessed Solanus as is customary during the rite of beatification for it to be venerated for the first time. Her miraculous cure from a skin disease, which led to the beatification, had occurred after she prayed at Fr. Solanus’s tomb at the Solanus Casey Center in Detroit in September 2012.

This was only the third beatification held in the United States. Blessed Solanus is the second U.S. male to be beatified; the first was Blessed Stanley Rother in Oklahoma City in September. The other beatification held in the U.S. was that of Blessed Miriam Demjanovich.
 
Background on the new saint

Father Solanus was ordained in1904 with the Capuchins of Detroit as a “simplex priest,” without faculties to hear confession or preach a homily due to his academic struggles in the seminary. Not knowing what to do with such a priest, he became a porter, answering the door at his first assignments in the Bronx in New York and then again from 1924 to 1945 in Detroit at St. Bonaventure Monastery.
 
He became renowned for his gifts of miracles and prophecy. People lined up for blocks to see Fr. Solanus who always encouraged everyone to “thank God ahead of time.” When he died at the age of 86 in Detroit on July 31, 1957—having returned for medical treatment from retirement in Indiana—more than 20,000 mourners viewed his body and 8,000 attended his funeral Mass, overflowing onto the streets.

Since then, there have been thousands of documented cures and reports of all sorts of answered prayers attributed to him. In 1987, when Father Solanus was declared venerable, his body was exhumed and found incorrupt despite water leaking in and rotting the inside of the coffin and his grey habit. His body was put in a new coffin and placed in the chapel of the monastery.

Bismarck connection

In the Bismarck diocese, people with connections to Detroit and serving the poor have also come to know and love Fr. Solanus. Two brothers, Dr. Ralph and Terry Dunnigan, parishioners of Cathedral of the Holy Spirit in Bismarck, grew up knowing about Fr. Solanus. Their father was the attending physician for him at St. Joseph’s hospital in Detroit when he died.
 
Father Solanus had been diagnosed with an advanced case of erysipelas—a skin disease— so that his legs actually turned black. Yet, he never complained.  The nurse who was with him when he died reported that Fr. Solanus suddenly stretched forth his hands and said, “I give my soul to Jesus Christ."

Ralph and Terry have many relatives in the Detroit area and visit St. Bonaventure’s and the Solanus Casey Center often. One of their cousins took his one-year-old son with a heart defect to St. Bonaventure’s 18 years ago. “My aunt Mary, who is a nun, asked Brother Leo [the vice postulator at the time] to take Fr. Solanus’s stole out of the case and put it on Brandon,” Terry explained. “He was healed and is now a 19-year-old freshman in college.”

When Ralph and Terry’s dad was diagnosed with prostate cancer and not expected to live more than two years, he visited St. Bonaventure and immediately improved and lived another 12 years, according to Terry.
 
“After my father died in 2002, I was in Detroit for a cousin’s wedding and went to St. Bonaventure,” Terry said. “In the room with Fr. Solanus’s tomb, I felt my dad and Fr. Solanus with me. It was such a strong, overwhelming feeling, I started sobbing.” He said that he prays to Fr. Solanus at least once a day and keeps a relic badge (with cloth touched to the tomb) in his cars.
 
Father Jared Johnson, rector ad interim for Cathedral of the Holy Spirit, Fr. Joseph Evinger, associate pastor of St. Joseph’s in Williston, and Michael Weisbeck, Director of Finance and Operations at Light of Christ Catholic Schools, all learned about Fr. Solanus while studying at Sacred Heart Major Seminary in Detroit.
 
“It seemed that everybody in the metro Detroit area knew about Fr. Solanus,” Fr. Johnson said. “Many people also seemed to have some connection to him, whether a family member who personally visited him or somebody they know who was impacted by him.”
 
The two qualities of Fr. Solanus that Fr. Johnson said most inspired him were his humility and his very clear desire to do God's will. “When he first started to discern a call to the priesthood, Our Lady said to him in prayer, ‘Go to Detroit,’" Fr. Johnson explained. “He responded almost immediately and as they say, the rest is history. His life can inspire any Catholic to see that our call to holiness is found in being faithful to our vocation each day.”
 
Father Evinger said he was inspired by Fr. Solanus’s constant awareness of God's presence and his receptivity to this presence. “His humility with joy particularly stands out,” he said. After living in Detroit for four years, Fr. Evinger said he knows how delighted people there were about the beatification. “I am filled with joy for them,” he said.
 
When Weisbeck learned about Fr. Solanus, he said his heart was moved by such virtues of humility and expectant faith. Weisbeck noted that while the humble porter acted as the "automatic door opener" at the monastery, “soon, he became the destination.”
 
Father Solanus can be a model for us all, according to Weisbeck, to never think that any duty is beneath us. “It’s incredibly inspiring to see the ways in which God consistently uses the humble for his greater glory.”

Serving the poor

Although Msgr. Chad Gion, pastor of Spirit of Life parish in Mandan, has never been to Detroit, he has an icon of Fr. Solanus hanging next to one of Mother Teresa at the church entrance.

“Given that Fr. Solanus was a porter and a source of healing for those who came to him, we wanted people to be greeted by him spiritually speaking,” Msgr. Gion explained. “His ministry and our charism as a parish match up.”  Spirit of Life has several ministries to serve the poor.
During the beatification Mass, Cardinal Amato said in his homily, that Fr. Solanus saw serving the poor “as a way to light his path to the splendor of God.”

The cardinal explained that the holy priest’s favorites were the poor, the sick, the indigent and the homeless. He shared a story of when the soup kitchen that Fr. Solanus helped open during the Depression ran out of food. “More than 200 people were still waiting to eat. He began reciting the ‘Our Father’ and then a baker appeared at the door with bread and other things. When the people saw this, they began to cry with emotion. Father Solanus simply stated: ‘See? God provides. No one will suffer if we put our trust in divine Providence.’”