As our nation turns its attention to the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, I’ve found myself wrapped up by a sobering event: 9/11. I am recalling the manner Americans instantly sought God in our collective grief.
A quarter century after America’s worship spaces overflowed with grieving citizens, there is little reason to believe the anniversary of our nation’s birth will unite us—not even briefly. The heartbreaking truth is that our divisions seem only to deepen year by year.
For the faithful, this dark reality carries a particular weight. We know our fractiousness is not just a civic catastrophe; but a seemingly irreparable spiritual wound. Even Christians, who are commanded by Jesus to love their enemies, seem to hate them more and more. Political balkanization, moral relativism, emotivism, and the muted prophetic voice of hesitant Catholic clergy have all worked to pull a heavy tarpaulin over pleasing anthems, Baseball, Apple Pie, and Chevrolet jingles, and movies like It’s a Wonderful Life and Rocky.
There is, however, an answer to America’s unraveling. And it is the only real path capable of uniting us—or, at the very least, bringing us closer together and greater order to our chaos.
A wave of benevolence will undoubtedly sweep across our nation of 340 million people if Americans came to know the lives of our canonized saints, blesseds, venerables, and servants of God. Their stories are not Catholic stories; they are American stories—accounts of men and women whose lives were marked by courage, sacrifice, mercy, and a commitment to the poor and common good.
I write these words not only to Catholics, but also to every American—Jew, Muslim, Protestant. What I propose has nothing to do with devotion to Mary, praying the Rosary, belief in the Real Presence, or acceptance of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception. Whatever our religious convictions, any thoughtful non-Catholic of good will can look to America’s Catholic saints—and to the hundreds of men and women whose causes for canonization are now under consideration—and recognize in their lives examples of virtue and imitation.
None sought fame; all sought God alone.
Most of them were ordinary Americans who woke each morning, went about their daily lives, and simply tried their best. They were Black, White, Native American, and immigrants. They were husbands and wives, mothers and fathers, priests and religious, laborers and educators.
Some died young, others in middle age, and still others after long lives well lived. What united them was not extraordinary talent or worldly success, but an extraordinary commitment to loving God, living virtuously, and serving their neighbors.
They were far from perfect. One had an abortion. At least one divorced. Others had to fight to overcome poor decision-making. One was condemned by his own bishop.
They lived lives that, by worldly standards, were unspectacular. Blessed Solanus Casey spent the majority of his priesthood answering the monastery door. Charlene Richard, the “Little Cajun Saint,” was a twelve-year-old girl who offered her suffering for the salvation of souls before her death. Irving “Francis” Houle was a Michigan husband, father of five, and manufacturer who pursued holiness through faithful family life.
Venerable Augustus Tolton was born into slavery and became the first publicly recognized Black Catholic priest in the United States. His friend, St. Katharine Drexel, relinquished her inheritance to found dozens of schools and missions for Black Americans, Native Americans, and other marginalized communities.
Thankfully, these stories and many others will be shared from July 1-9, at the “Catholic Saints of America” exhibit on the site of the only Church-approved Marian apparition site in the United States in Champion, Wisconsin. Relics, exhibits, and nearly eighty saints’ guilds will celebrate some of America’s most remarkable men and women.
A special novena prayer begins on July 1st (which can be found on the link at the bottom of this article) that seeks Mary’s intercession for unity, holiness, and renewal nationwide.
A Tale of American Heroism
What follows is just one story, among hundreds, that will be shared next week on how a single American helped to reshape the world.
In 1957, Washington DC-native Fr. Aloysius Schwartz promised Our Lady—at an obscure apparition site in Banneux, Belgium—that he would enter the poorest places on earth to help save the bullied, abandoned, abused, and poverty-stricken.
As his formation in Louvain edged closer to his ordination, the idea of nailing himself to the Cross as the Jesus Christ, in persona Christi, gnawed at the seminarian. To serve Christ in total, Aloysius felt he needed to embrace and live out Christ’s Passion. After ordination in 1957, Schwartz raised his hand to be sent to the saddest place in the world: South Korea after the Korean War.
On the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, he stepped off the train in Seoul as a fresh-faced priest and found himself in a post-war dystopian novel. Putrefied sewage, decaying animals, and human waste scorched his nostrils, the incense of his new home. America wasn’t his any longer. Fr. Al had given everything in his life to the Virgin of the Poor, and she in turn gave him her poor.
He stood there like Ichabod Crane on the bitterly cold day, looking startled and fence-post skinny inside his wind-whipped cassock, his sharp, dominant nose seemingly pointing out to the ruination before him. Squatters with blank stares picked through hills of garbage. Paper-fleshed orphans lay on the streets like leftover war landmines, beggars huddled in cardboard boxes, and lunatics muttered into the long-traveling winds coming from the plains of Manchuria in northern China.
An exhausted-looking boy, unnoticed by Seoul’s morning passersby, zombied up a frozen path with a small girl, about three years old, tied to his back. She resembled a clump of unwashed clothes. Her hair was matted and had fallen out in patches. She was sick. The boy’s thin, cotton clothing looked to have just sopped up mud. Fr. Al’s heart was wrung.
The boy and girl collapsed onto the ground. The sunken-eyed boy watched the soles of shoes, few of whose wearers stopped to notice, parade past in a whir. The pair laid on the path; it seemed to be a good place to die. Fr. Al had just encountered the first of countless thousands of orphans he would raise up.
Shortly, Fr. Al would reach down to lift up a child, then another. And within a few years, he would begin to change the course of Korean history. Many people on the Korean peninsula began to see him as Atlas. Others just called him the Father of Orphans.
Fr. Al, who grew up poor in a Washington D.C. rowhouse during the Great Depression, realized early on that his priestly identity needed to take on features of the world’s poor and abandoned. As Christ loved and became one with the poor, he would, too.
A Father of Orphans
Fr. Al is now on the path to sainthood in the Church. Since forming the religious order of the Sisters of Mary in 1964, more than 175,000 of the world’s poorest children in seven counties have graduated from his authentically Catholic Boystown and Girlstown communities.
These Boystowns and Girlstowns have produced professional athletes, orchestral musicians, CEOs, restaurant owners, teachers, attorneys, engineers, architects, priests, nuns, and countless other professions. Each of these students and graduates shares one thing in common; they once grew up in stark poverty. Many would be dead if Fr. Al hadn’t reached for them.
Fr. Al had a mission to tend to orphans, to lepers, to outcasts, to unwed mothers, to the developmentally disabled, and all others on the margins. He built hospitals, schools, sanatoriums, homeless centers, houses for the disabled and for unwed mothers. The work eventually expanded to the Philippines in the 1980s. When he opened the doors to the Mexican poor in 1991, his body was fading away in the grip of ALS.
The reason many of you don’t know about his saintly life is that he didn’t want you to know. He prayed not to be known.
In 1992, before his body faded away in the grip of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s Disease), it is believed that perhaps no priest in the history of the world did as much as he did for the orphaned and tormented child.
Organizers believe more than 15,000 people will visit Wisconsin over the next ten days, where many will encounter lives of such extraordinary virtue that they seem impossible by modern standards. Yet these men and women were real Americans whose lives reshaped the nation.
Fr. Al Schwartz, St. Elizabeth Ann Seton, St. Damien of Molokai, and Venerable Patrick Peyton rightfully belong alongside Jackie Robinson, Amelia Earhart, George Washington, and Abraham Lincoln in the American story. They, too, helped shape the character of our nation through lives of holiness, service, and love.
And perhaps, at this hinge point in our history, they are among those best equipped to show us the way back.
CATHOLIC SAINTS OF AMERICA
Celebrating Our Nation’s 250th Birthday
July 1–9, 2026 | National Shrine of Our Lady of Champion | Champion, Wisconsin
In honor of America’s 250th anniversary, the National Shrine of Our Lady of Champion will host Catholic Saints of America, a special celebration highlighting the holy men and women who have shaped the Catholic Faith in the United States. The event will feature an inspiring exhibit on American saints, blesseds, venerables, and servants of God; opportunities to venerate relics; presentations from shrines and guilds promoting American sainthood causes; daily speakers; and a Novena for Our Nation praying for unity, holiness, and renewal. Featured figures include Augustus Tolton, Solanus Casey, Dorothy Day, Frances Xavier Cabrini, and many others whose lives witness to faith, sacrifice, and service. Mass will be celebrated daily. The Shrine is located at 4047 Chapel Drive, Champion, WI 54229. For more information, call 920-866-2571 or email info@championshrine.org.
Photo by Marek Studzinski on Unsplash
