During the Civil War, many of the nation’s native Protestants had the same question about the tide of immigrant Catholics, overwhelmingly Irish, that had been surging across the Atlantic: Just how American — how real, pure, genuine American — were they?
Some New Haven men thought they had answered that once and for all by joining the Union Army and serving alongside scores of thousands of other Irish immigrants. So deep was the bond they formed among themselves while fighting for their new nation that they stuck together after they returned home. Their regular meetings evolved into a fraternal group that took its name, the Red Knights, from the color of the blankets they had carried in their knapsacks.
And when a young curate at St. Mary’s got the idea to start a Catholic fraternal organization, he borrowed many of his ideas about its form and purpose, as well as most of its first leaders, from this local group of patriotic Catholics.
Father Michael J. Mc- Givney was himself the son of immigrants. Like many other first- and second-generation Americans, he was concerned about what role the faith his family had brought from the Old World would have in a new world that often regarded it with suspicion, even scorn.
The Church provided spiritual sustenance to be sure, but what practical value might it additionally offer? How might it keep men from drifting away from the faith and into the competing rituals of the secret societies that were so popular? How might it help the families left behind, as his own had been, when fathers died too young, felled by hard jobs and heart-straining worries at the bottom of the economic ladder? How might it help Catholics become better Catholics at the same time that they became better Americans?
On March 29, 1882, the Connecticut state legislature officially chartered the Knights of Columbus, a fraternal benefit society founded by Father Michael J. McGivney with a group of parishioners in the basement of St. Mary’s Church in New Haven. Still true to its founding principles of charity, unity, and fraternity 125 years later, the Knights of Columbus has grown to the largest lay Catholic organization in the world with more than 1.7 million members.
Throughout its history, the Knights of Columbus has been an effective advocate and defender of civil and religious rights for all. The organization has also contributed billions of dollars and millions of hours of volunteer service to charity. This site recalls many prominent events in the Knights of Columbus’ history and offers the Supreme Knight’s view for its future.
Over the course of its history, the Knights of Columbus has been an unstoppable force for good in the Church and society. Learn how a handful of immigrant Catholic men, led by one visionary priest, Father Michael J. McGivney, seized the spirit of their times to found an organization whose appeal is timeless because its goals are for all eternity.
How to be Catholic in America — that was the theme which inspired and animated the organization that Father McGivney founded in the basement of St. Mary’s Church 125 years ago.
It was embodied in the name chosen by the 75 men at the first official meeting on a snowy February evening in New Haven. By calling themselves the “Knights of Columbus,” they were indelibly linking their church and their country, staking their own claim to the New World.
By invoking the name of the Italian explorer, they underlined a simple, stark, unassailable fact — that this predominantly Protestant nation might openly discriminate against Catholic immigrants and impugn their loyalty, might scurrilously defame the Church and the pope, might do everything it could to make Catholics feel unwelcome here, but it was in fact a nation that celebrated as its discoverer a Catholic.
And the Catholic descendants of Columbus, one charter member said, “were entitled to all rights and privileges due to such a discovery by one of our faith.”
By 1885, the Order had paid its first death benefit and accumulated enough members for a thousand Knights to parade through downtown New Haven, led by a carriage carrying Father McGivney. “The parade is a credit to the Irish race,” the former governor of Connecticut said as the marchers passed.
The Hartford Telegram agreed: “There are some narrowminded people living in New England yet who imagine that the Irish race are idle, slovenly and often vicious,” an editorial declared, but the parade proved that “the second generation in this country are intensely American in their instincts, and they are forging ahead to prominent positions in commerce, trade and in the professions.”
By the mid-1890s, the Order was spreading beyond Connecticut, and fighting back hard as the Nativist movement gained strength during a four-year economic depression.
“With true American patriotism,” wrote Thomas Cummings, editor of The Columbiad and the Order’s national organizer, “they demand from their members respect for manhood and liberty for the individual, particularly that liberty which is the essence of all liberty and which was first planted on this continent by Roman Catholics, viz: Freedom to worship God according to one’s conscience.”
When America went to war against Spain in 1898, the Catholic Church opposed it, but the Knights did what it regarded as its national duty and supported the war.
“[A]t the declaration of war all personal opinions as to the wisdom of such a course were forgotten” one state deputy reported, “and the Catholic people, imbued with the teachings of our Holy Church, to be always ready to sacrifice everything for our Faith and Country, offered themselves by the hundreds to fight and, if need be, to die in defense of our Country’s cause.”.