of that! It could only mean that he was to join the Capuchins, one of the three major branches of the Franciscan order. The Lord had been faithful and answered his prayer.
When he finally left Sacred Heart, Barney felt like a new man. His heart was filled with gratitude for the Lord’s goodness. He jogged home to tell his family of his new call to the Capuchins. Then he set about learning more about the order he was to enter.
Established in Italy as a separate branch of Franciscans in the seventeenth century, the Capuchins were named for the capuche, or hood, attached to their brown Franciscan robes. They were founded by Matteo da Bascio and two others in the sixteenth century. Da Bascio’s little band longed to follow the Rule of St. Francis “to the letter.” Theirs was to be a stricter observance and a life based on absolute poverty, such as St. Francis had lived.
The order quickly gained many members in Europe but was later diminished by plagues and political oppression. Around the time of its greatest decline in membership, in 1883, a Capuchin province was established in America, with its base in Detroit.
The two founders of the Capuchin outreach to America were Fr. Francis Haas and Fr. Bonaventure Frey. When they came, these two were not even Capuchins — they were diocesan priests from Switzerland — but they had a commitment to the Capuchin charism. The two priests had arrived in America in 1856, the year before Barney Casey Sr. arrived from Ireland. In the years that Barney Casey Sr. was founding a family and livelihood, the Capuchin founders were setting up missions in Wisconsin, Michigan, and near New York City.
The Capuchin history was impressive, but Barney Jr. contemplated it with mixed feelings. The message about going to Detroit wasn’t one he would have been likely to “invent” for himself. He had been uncomfortable at the Capuchin house he had visited in late spring. It was quite formal and austere. The Capuchin monks wore beards in imitation of St. Francis, and this bothered Barney. Not so much because of the beards themselves — his own father had always worn a beard — but because the Capuchins left their beards untrimmed out of respect for the Franciscan call to simplicity. The thought of that didn’t appeal to Barney Jr. at all. He was aware that his abhorrence of Capuchin whiskers was a minor factor. Yet, there was really nothing else about the prospect of joining the Capuchins that appealed to him, either.
Regardless of all these doubts, by December 20 he was ready to “go to Detroit.” Because it was so close to Christmas, his family wanted him to stay and spend the holiday with them. They knew that it would be years before they would see him again. But Barney would not yield. It was, he insisted, time to go.
In the midst of a blinding snowstorm, he left Superior on December 20 and headed southwest for St. Paul on the 11:00 p.m. train. From St. Paul, his train then headed east, pulling along slowly through drifting snow to Milwaukee. After a brief layover there, during which Barney stayed with Capuchins for the first time, he boarded a train again. Down through Chicago and over to Michigan, his train headed for his goal — Detroit.
On Christmas Eve, the train pulled into the station in Detroit at last. Barney located a streetcar and headed for Mt. Elliott Avenue. There, at 1740 Mt. Elliott, the young man finally arrived, well after dusk. Exhausted, he refused the offer of dinner. He was too tired. Upstairs, on the second floor, he was shown to his room: a simple, stark little space with a wooden door latch. The sight of it immediately renewed his fears of this Capuchin austerity. But, spent with the strain of travel, he pulled off his shoes and heavy coat, still wet with snow, pulled a blanket up over himself, and soon fell into a deep sleep.
Just before midnight, he awoke to the sound of hand chimes and the voices of men singing. They were singing Christmas carols in German. It was Christmas Eve! As the voices grew louder, Barney could hear other men getting out of bed and coming down the corridor to join their voices with the little group of carolers. Barney joined them, and his heart was lifted. The gloom over his decision to follow Our Lady’s orders and “go to Detroit” left him.
Down and around, through the darkened corridors, the carolers moved. Carrying candles, they roused the other Capuchins who then followed down into the chapel for Christmas Midnight Mass. It was a moving, joy-filled occasion and initiated a week or more of festivities.
Once that week passed, however, the same anxieties about his decision plagued Barney again. The transition to the new year provided no fresh hope or renewed vision that his future here could be happy and fulfilling. Capuchins were invested with the habit very soon after entrance, and he dreaded the finality of that.
His investiture into the novitiate was set for January 14, 1897. The closer the date came, the more anxious he felt about his decision. Penning his thoughts into his small book on the Rule of St. Francis and the Constitution of the Capuchins, he referred to this day of investiture as a “day of anxiety,” and its coming looked to him as “dark indeed.”
On January 14, however, Barney finally slipped the heavy brown cassock over his head and pulled on the Franciscan’s heavy sandals over his socks. Perhaps he pulled some new vision or a feeling of peace over his psyche at the same moment. Whatever the reason, the actual investiture seemed to settle his spirit. Those painful anxieties and second thoughts seemed to dissolve into the wide, high hallways of the friary that he would come to know very well.
From that day, Barney Casey was known among the Capuchins as “Frater” (or “Brother”) Francis Solanus Casey. St. Francis Solano, a Spaniard, was a violin-playing Franciscan missionary in South America during the seventeenth century. Francis Solano had had a powerful gift of preaching and had taken the pains to learn so many of the local dialects that he was thought to have the gift of tongues! In July 1897, seven new men entered the novitiate program to join Frater Solanus and two other novices, Leo Steinberg and Salesius Schneweis. Life in the novitiate was rigorous but not a novelty to the young man from Superior. For four years, he had lived a very ordered life at St. Francis de Sales Minor Seminary. Because the new Frater Solanus had entered the Capuchin novitiate in January instead of in the summer as men usually did, he was between regular groups. Fraters Leo and Salesius were six months ahead of him in the novitiate, and the seven new men were six months behind. Frater Solanus’s novitiate was to be longer because the vows ending the novitiate were made only in July.
Day by day, Solanus merged his life with the schedule of the friary. It was certainly different from the life he had come to know as a conductor on a streetcar line. In that life, he had kept his pocket watch handy to double-check the time. Being at the right intersection, at precisely the right minute, was important. By contrast, inside the monastery, men walked, talked, ate, and slept in a pattern hundreds of years old. The proximity of the twentieth century changed life here very little.
Solanus and the other friars were wrenched from sleep each day at 4:45 a.m. The youngest brother would walk up and down the halls where the friars were sleeping in their rooms — called cells — and clap two two-by-four boards together to awaken the rest of his brothers. After this harsh awakening, the friars then had fifteen minutes to wash a bit and don their brown habits and sandals before they went to the chapel.
Each friar’s cell was simple and spare. That of Frater Solanus, like those of other Capuchins, was a room of about nine by twelve feet. In every cell was an iron bed with a cornhusk mattress and a pillow. The pillowcases and sheets were made from mattress ticking. There was a window, but it had no curtain. A small table, a small armless chair, and two clothes pegs on the wall rounded out the “furnishings.” There was no closet. Capuchin brothers could hang all the clothes they owned on those two hooks.
At 5:10 a.m., the day of prayer began with Lauds. The Litany of the Saints, private meditation, and the Angelus, said just before 6:00 a.m., prepared the friars for Mass, which began at six o’clock. At seven, breakfast was served in the refectory. It was simple — cereal or bread and coffee. It was eaten in silence. Any time remaining before 8:00 a.m. was used for spiritual reading.
