An estimated crowd of 8,000 to 10,000 people attended the funeral services of Fr. Solanus Casey in 1957. In this file photo, Detroit police stand guard as the friars enter St. Bonaventure Monastery for the funeral Mass. (Photos courtesy of the Solanus Casey Center)As the beloved Capuchin aged, his superiors had moved him from his post at the Detroit monastery’s doors, seeking to give the elderly friar some much-needed rest.
Despite his own failing health, Fr. Solanus refused to say “no” to the dozens of visitors he continued to receive each day. But he also wouldn’t refuse his superiors’ orders when he was finally transferred in 1945.
A photographer snaps a photo of Fr. Solanus Casey’s aged and crooked fingers in 1956, the year before he passed away July 31, 1957, at the age of 86.Fr. Solanus’ “retirement” to friaries in New York and Huntington, Ind., however, was short-lived, and as news spread of the friar’s presence there, the dozens of daily visits he’d received in Detroit started up again.
In 1956, when an advancing skin disease necessitated the 86-year-old friar’s transfer back to Detroit for an operation, the provincial tried hard to keep the news quiet.
“For while Detroit afforded every medical skill and facility that might aid his recovery, it was also the home of thousands of his friends and, one might say, his spiritual children,” wrote James Patrick Derum in his 1968 biography, “The Porter of St. Bonaventure’s.”
Soon, however, there seemed little point in keeping Fr. Solanus’ arrival a secret any longer, and by the time The Detroit Sunday News wrote an article on Dec. 2, 1956, alerting the public to his presence in the city, it was already common knowledge.
On May 15, 1957, Fr. Solanus was transferred to St. John Hospital in Detroit with severe erysipelas, or skin eruptions, which caused him severe pain all over his body. Even on his deathbed, however, Fr. Solanus constantly praised God for his illness and continued to intercede for others.
“Fr. Solanus spent the last days of his life at St. John Hospital, where I worked,” Rosellen Loye-Bucy of Almont, a reader of The Michigan Catholic, wrote. “I had the privilege of visiting him there at the end, very weak and frail but alert. An aura of holiness surrounded him almost visibly.”
When one of the sisters who was attending to him asked where he hurt, his reply was almost automatic: “Oh, I hurt all over — thanks be to God,” Fr. Solanus said with a smile. “God is so good,” he said. “Glory be to God, glory be to God.”
When another sister expressed sympathy about the condition of Fr. Solanus’ raw and red hands, upon which she had to remove adhesive tape, he replied, “Sister, don’t feel bad about it. Look at Our Lord’s hands.”
Even while suffering from immense pain, Fr. Solanus was more concerned with others’ salvation than with his own misery.
“I am offering my suffering that all might be one. Oh, if I could only live to see the conversion of the whole world,” Fr. Solanus said. “I cannot die,” Derum records Fr. Solanus saying, “until everyone knows the love of God.”
In the hospital room, Fr. Solanus continued to receive near-daily visitors, including from other patients seeking his prayers — visits he relished until his last breath.
Gerry Wilczynski, grand knight of Solanus Casey Council 3797 at St. Margaret of Scotland Parish in St. Clair Shores, recalls a conversation he had with the late Gerald Downing, a charter member of Council 3797 who met Fr. Solanus on the last day of the friar’s life.
Downing, a young construction worker at the time, had fallen off a 35-foot wall and was rushed to Detroit’s St. John Hospital.
“He was so battered that they predicted he wasn’t going to live long,” Wilczynski recalled. “Well, Gerald’s wife knew Fr. Solanus and knew he was in the hospital at the same time, so she went and asked him to pray with Gerry. Father went to his room that night and they prayed together, and the next day Fr. Solanus died. But Gerry got better and ended up living another 57 years.”
Wilczynski said the Solanus Casey Council, chartered in Roseville, was the first to adopt the priest as its patron when it was renamed in 1966.
“At the time Fr. Solanus was doing a lot of work with the council for homeless people. That’s why they picked up his name,” Wilczynski said. “I was impressed that Father was just a doorkeeper and ran things for people coming in for help and assistance. But he was a real great man.”
Such a great man, in fact, that more than 8,000 people filed past his casket in the days leading up to the friar’s funeral at St. Bonaventure Monastery.
One of Fr. Solanus’ works, the Capuchin Soup Kitchen, continues to inspire council members’ charity to this day, almost 90 years after it was founded during the Great Depression.
Russell Kreinbring, past grand knight of Council 3797, volunteers every Monday and Thursday at the soup kitchen, while his wife, Paula, volunteers on Thursdays at its food distribution warehouse.
“When I retired, I was looking for something to do, and there was a little article in the Capuchin Soup Kitchen magazine that volunteers are always needed,” said Kreinbring, a Knight for 53 years who also serves as financial secretary for the fourth-degree Solanus Casey Assembly 521. “It’s a thankful place to work. You’re giving back to the community, as Fr. Solanus did.”
The Life of Fr. Solanus Casey
This article is the first of six about the life and ministry of Fr. Solanus Casey.
- Irish immigrant family instilled virtue, love of God in young Fr. Solanus
- A struggling student heeds a woman’s advice: ‘Go to Detroit’
- A ‘simple’ friar meets people where they are: at the monastery doors
- God sends a healing prophet: Fr. Solanus and the power of the Mass
- For Fr. Solanus, Jesus and the saints were a powerful combination
- Fr. Solanus’ last days: An ‘aura of holiness’ and suffering lifted to God
