Father Solanus Casey
DETROIT — Father Solanus Casey, a Capuchin Franciscan “who would provide soup for the hungry, kind words for the troubled and a healing touch for the ill,” will be beatified Nov. 18, the Capuchin Franciscan Province of St. Joseph in Detroit has announced.
The ceremony will take place at Ford Field in Detroit, which the province said would be configured to accommodate 60,000 people.
A member of the Detroit-based province and one of the co-founders of the city’s Capuchin Soup Kitchen, Father Casey was born Nov. 25, 1870, and died July 31, 1957.
He will be the second American-born male to be beatified, after Father Stanley Rother, a North American priest from Oklahoma who in 1981 was martyred while serving the people of a Guatemalan village and will be beatified Sept. 23. Father Casey also will be the first person from Michigan to achieve the designation.
“We are filled with joy at receiving the final date of the beatification of Father Solanus,” said Capuchin Franciscan Father Michael Sullivan, provincial minister of the Province of St. Joseph. “It is a beautiful way to celebrate the 60th anniversary of his passing.”
“The beatification of Father Solanus will be a tremendous blessing for the whole community of southeast Michigan, an opportunity for all of us to experience the love of Jesus Christ,” Detroit Archbishop Allen H. Vigneron said in a statement after the beatification date was announced June 27.
The province said details on the beatification ceremony, including ceremony time, will be released in the coming weeks; those interested in receiving details by email can sign up at solanuscasey.org/beatification. Ticket information will be made available by Aug. 15.
Among the hundreds, if not thousands, of healings attributed to Father Casey during and after his lifetime, Pope Francis recognized the authenticity of a miracle necessary for the friar to be elevated from venerable to blessed after a review by the Vatican’s Congregation for Saints’ Causes was completed earlier this year.
The miracle involved the healing — unexplained by medicine or science — of a woman with an incurable genetic skin disease. The woman was visiting friends in Detroit and stopped at Father Casey’s tomb to pray for others’ intentions. After her prayers, she felt the strong urging to ask for the friar’s intercession for herself, too, and received an instant and visible healing.
