The Knights of Columbus and Father McGivney

The largest Catholic fraternal organization in the world was founded in a church basement on Church Street in New Haven. On March twenty-ninth, eighteen eighty-two, a twenty-nine-year-old assistant pastor named Michael McGivney gathered a group of his parishioners at Saint Mary's Church and established what he called the Knights of Columbus.

McGivney was Irish-American, the eldest of thirteen children, born in Waterbury to parents who had come from Ireland during the famine years. His father worked in a brass mill. McGivney left school at thirteen to work in the same mill, then pursued seminary studies in Quebec and Maryland, interrupted when his father died in eighteen seventy-three and he came home to help raise his siblings. He was ordained in eighteen seventy-seven by Archbishop James Gibbons in Baltimore.

As an assistant pastor on Church Street, he watched what happened to immigrant Catholic families when the father died. There was no government safety net. The fraternal societies and labor unions that provided mutual aid in that era largely excluded Catholics. McGivney designed an alternative: a fraternal organization that would offer a life insurance benefit to members' widows. The original plan paid one thousand dollars upon a member's death, funded by a one-dollar assessment on every other member.

He died of pneumonia in eighteen ninety, at thirty-eight years old, before the organization was large enough for him to see what it would become. By two thousand twenty it had two million members worldwide. Pope John Paul the Second declared him Venerable in two thousand eight. He was beatified on October thirty-first, two thousand twenty, following the Vatican's certification of a miracle attributed to his intercession.