Capuchins, Religious Life 

Barney Casey loved baseball. - The Youth who became Father Solanus was a catcher for the "All Brothers" team, on which all positions were played by himself and his nine brothers. He led it to victory over some of the best amateur nines in northwestern Wisconsin.

He was gregarious; fun loving, and adventurous. At age fifteen he was a lumberjack; at sixteen, a prison guard; at seventeen, a motorman on some of America's first streetcars. He played the violin for dances, and at seventeen seriously proposed marriage to the most beautiful girl in his district school.

This quite typical boy and youth was highly practical and farsighted. At the age of nineteen he was instrumental in leading his parents and his thirteen brothers and sisters to a new life that opened up opportunity for all of them in various directions. When twenty-one, he entered a seminary to study for the Catholic priesthood.

Despite a serious learning block - he couldn't master languages - he was admitted to the priesthood. Because his theological knowledge was considered sub-standard, he performed menial monastery tasks through all his sixty years as a Capuchin friar.

Yet he became spiritual counselor to tens of thousands, deeply influenced a multitude of lives, and was known and loved by people in every part of the United States and by many in Canada. Hundreds attributed to his intercession seemingly inexplicable spiritual reformations and physical cures, but it was his boundless charity and luminous goodness that won him countless hearts to Christ.

When he died on July 31, 1957, his good works seemed to live on. Prompted by the urgent wishes of the many people who experienced that boundless charity, a movement for his beatification and canonization was initiated in 1966.

Since that time, the Cause for Fr. Solanus has gradually moved through various steps of the process for sainthood. The Informative Process, to examine his life, work and the practice of heroic virtue, was begun in the Archdiocese of Detroit in October of 1983 and completed on October 4, 1984. The official testimony of fifty-three witnesses with other necessary documentation was taken to Rome, and on October 13, 1984, was presented to the Sacred Congregation for Causes of Saints. There it must be thoroughly studied and evaluated before a definitive judgment can be made.

In the meantime, hundreds of letters of thanksgiving and reports of favors, have been received by the Vice Postulator in Detroit. People continue to seek his intercession and through his inspiring example, many find renewed faith and new hope in God's goodness.

Taken from the back cover.