Michael J. McGivney

The Servant of God Father Michael J. McGivney (August 12, 1852 - August 14, 1890) was a Roman Catholic priest and founder of the Knights of Columbus. He was the son of Irish immigrants.

Father McGivney entered Saint-Hyacinthe's Seminary in Saint-Hyacinthe, Quebec, Canada in 1868. He finished his studies at St. Mary's Seminary in Baltimore, Maryland in 1873, but had to leave the seminary and return home to help finish raising his siblings, due to the death of his father. He later returned to the seminary and was ordained a priest on December 22, 1877, by Archbishop James Gibbons at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

On February 2, 1882, while an assistant pastor at Saint Mary's Church in New Haven, Connecticut, McGivney founded the Knights of Columbus with a small group of parishioners. McGivney died from tuberculosis on the eve of the Assumption in 1890, when he was only thirty-eight years old.

The order now has over 1.7 million member families and thirteen thousand councils. During the 2004-2005 fraternal year, $134 million and 68 million man-hours were donated to charity by the order.

In 1996, the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Hartford opened an investigation into Father McGivney's life, with a stated goal of his beatification and canonization, or formal recognition by the Church of his sainthood. Fr. Gabriel O'Donnell, OP is the postulator of McGivney's cause, as well as director of the Fr. McGivney Guild. The diocesan investigation was closed in 2000, and the case was passed to the Congregation for the Causes of Saints in the Holy See. The progress of his cause allows him to be referred to as "the Servant of God, Fr. Michael J. McGivney."

On August 7, 2007, in his Homily at the Opening Mass at the 125th Supreme Council of the Knights of Columbus, Tarcisio Cardinal Bertone renewed his assistance to this cause as Secretary of State for The Vatican.

A biography by Douglas Brinkley and Julie M. Fenster of Fr. McGivney, Parish Priest: Father Michael McGivney and American Catholicism was published by William Morrow and Company in 2006.

In honor of him, the York Catholic District School Board in Ontario, Canada founded a school named Father Michael McGivney Catholic Academy in 1989. It is located in Markham and currently houses 1,400 students. The Catholic University of America is renovating and renaming a building McGivney Hall.