News - September 2023 RSS Feed

Blessed James Miller was born in 1944 near Steven’s Point, Wisconsin. He was the oldest of five siblings of a farming family of which he was always proud. He loved farm work, but he started thinking about the priesthood as a high school student. The Christian Brothers who taught at the Catholic High School he was attending encouraged him to consider being a teaching brother. In 1959, at the age of 15, he joined the juniorate of the LaSalle Christian Brothers in Glencoe, Missouri. A juniorate is essentially a high school of boys thinking of a joining the religious congregation. The juniorate was also a self-sufficient farm that the students helped to run. After finishing high school, he entered the novitiate of the LaSalle Christian Brothers and then was sent to the University of Minnesota at Winona to study Spanish.

Bernard Francis Casey (nicknamed Barney) was born on November 25, 1870, in Oak Grove, Wisconsin. He was the sixth of sixteen children born to Irish immigrants Bernard James Casey and Ellen Elizabeth Murphy. He felt called to the priesthood after witnessing a drunken sailor stabbing a woman. First, he studied at the seminary for the Archdiocese of Milwaukee. Classes were taught there in either German or Latin—neither of which he knew because of his limited educational background. In time he was advised to consider a religious order if he wanted to pursue ordination to the priesthood. When he prayed about what he should do, he felt led to apply to the Capuchin Friars in Detroit. After entering the Capuchins in 1897, Barney Casey was given the religious name Solanus after Saint Francis Solanus (1549-1610), a Spanish Franciscan friar and missionary in South America.

Last Sunday Marcello Cardinal Semeraro, the prefect of the Dicastery for the Causes of Saints, travelled to the village of Markowa, in southwestern Poland to preside at the beatification of an entire family: Józef and Wiktoria Ulma and their seven children. They were murdered because they had practiced the corporal work of mercy of sheltering the homeless.

I am continuing this series on Saints and Blesseds of the United States. This week I am featuring Blessed Stanley Francis Rother (1935-81) who has a special connection with my family. More on that below. Much of the material that I am presenting is taken from the website of the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City, his home diocese. Another useful source for this brief portrait of Blessed Stanley is an interview with his sister in the National Catholic Register.