Michael J. McGivney

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Father Michael McGivney

Father Michael J. McGivney (August 12, 1852 - August 14, 1890) was a Roman Catholic priest and founder of the Knights of Columbus.

Father McGivney entered St. Mary's Seminary in Baltimore, Maryland in 1873, he 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 Cathedral of the Assumption of the 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 manhours 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 membership in the sainthood. The diocesan investigation was closed in 2000, and the case was passed to the Congregation for the Causes of Saints in the Holy See.

A biography by Douglas Brinkley and Julie M. Fenster of Fr. McGivney, Parish Priest: Father Michael McGivney and American Catholicism was published by HarperCollins 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 1400 students. The Catholic University of America is renovating and renaming a building McGivney hall.