HIS FAITH

Photo of St. Mary's Church interior with Carolingian-style crucifix designed by Tommaso Gismondi suspended over altar.

Keeping the Faith

Father McGivney not only lived a life devoted to the Catholic faith; he also focused all his spiritual, mental and physical energies on helping others persevere and grow in that faith, and he guarded against whatever might diminish the practice of Catholicism.

For Father McGivney’s newly formed Knights, protecting the faith of Catholics was the prime concern, and this quickly took three forms.

First, the Knights would serve as an antidote to those secret societies that lured Catholic men away from their faith by offering financial benefits.

Second, the Order’s insurance program would help keep Catholic families together when a breadwinner died; this would also help prevent a loss of faith among widows and orphans forced to live in state institutions or with non-Catholic relatives or adoptive families.

Third, the Knights would champion the full rights of American citizenship for Catholics. This, too, would support the Church, since ensuring equal rights for Catholics would help limit the social or civil pressure on them to abandon their faith.

Photo of two college men in gray Knights of Columbus t-shirts painting windows with white paint.

Practical Catholics

The one requirement of membership in the Knights of Columbus is that a man be a “practical Catholic” in union with the Holy See. What does the term “practical Catholic” mean?

Faith for Father McGivney and his Knights was not simply knowing the catechism, important as that is. It was putting into practice the Great Commandment of Jesus: To love God with all your heart and your neighbor as yourself. True to the parable of the Good Samaritan, love of neighbor does not stop at the church door. It goes out into the streets, the highways and byways, to encounter those on the margins of society – who were often immigrant Catholics in Father McGivney’s day – and bring them practical charity and fraternal love.

A “practical Catholic” has a love of home, family and church, where faith is nurtured. Yet his faith leads him into the world, even a world suffused with anti-Catholic sentiment, in the spirit of the Good Samaritan. He is called to bind up the wounds of the sick and abandoned, to provide for their temporal needs, to support the faith of Catholics and pass on the faith to inquirers, and to live a life of prayer and virtue, with love of God and neighbor.

Photo of three college men kneeling and holding rosary beads in their clasped hands.

Faith in Action

For more than a century, Knights of Columbus have followed the formula of faith put forth by Father McGivney. Today, with a model called Faith in Action, nearly 2 million Knights throughout the world live out the Order’s principles of charity, unity and fraternity with programs such as Food for Families, Coats for Kids, Ultrasound Initiative, Special Olympics, Vocations Support, Global Wheelchair Mission, Habitat for Humanity, Consecration to the Holy Family, and days of spiritual reflection.

Thanks to the structure of the Order and the trust that Father McGivney placed in his men from the beginning, there is no limit to the good that a Knight today can do for his family, his parish, his council, and his community as he puts his faith into action.