The Catholic Church on Saturday will elevate the founder of the Knights of Columbus toward sainthood, emphasizing his fight against anti-Catholicism.
Father Michael McGivney, who will be beatified in Hartford, Connecticut, started the Knights in response to a prevailing sense of anti-Catholicism at the turn of the last century. The fraternal group, one of the most prominent Catholic organizations in America, in the past two years has become the focal point of several religious freedom battles, most notably during confirmation hearings in the Senate Judiciary Committee.
In that fight, several Democratic senators, including Mazie Hirono and Kamala Harris, asked three members of the Knights in late 2018 if they would renounce their membership in the organization because of its opposition to gay marriage and abortion. When a series of reports publicized the questions the following year, Republicans critics decried Democrats for imposing “religious tests” on judicial nominees and censured Hirono and Harris.
The Knights faced another instance of anti-Catholicism this summer when a vandal spray-painted Satanic symbols on the door of a church building in the parish where McGivney held the first Knights meeting in 1882. The incident was part of a rash of attacks on churches that occurred in the midst of widespread protests this summer.
Elevating McGivney’s amid a resurgence of anti-religious and particularly anti-Catholic sentiment sends a message to critics of the public exercise of faith, said Supreme Knight Carl Anderson. Citing the prejudice that Catholics and ethnic minorities faced in the 19th century, including recently overturned Blaine Amendments against public funds to Catholic education, Anderson told the Washington Examiner that McGivney used the Knights to show that it is possible to be “faithful to your religious tradition and at the same time be a good citizen.”
“He chose not to be overcome by evil, but to overcome evil with good,” Anderson said of McGivney, who originally founded the group as a safety net for Catholics who were excluded from labor unions and fraternal organizations. The group over the years has clashed with hate groups, notably the Ku Klux Klan in a 1925 Supreme Court case.
More recently, the Knights were one of the groups that opposed an Obama-era contraception mandate that resulted in the case Little Sisters of the Poor Saints Peter and Paul Home v. Pennsylvania. Anderson said that the group’s vocal involvement in religious liberty is consistent with the founding principles of McGivney.
“The practice of disparaging minority, particularly religious minorities, is not so different than from what we see today,” Anderson said. “It’s always going to be a constant issue.”
