We are pleased to announce the winners of the 2025-2026 Blessed Solanus Casey Essay Prizes. This year’s competition granted three awards: first place ($2,500), second place ($1,500), and third place ($750).
First Place: Kaile Kilner — a Master of Arts in Theology student at Unión Teológica Católica in Chicago, for her essay Written on the Heart: Blessed Solanus Casey’s Embodiment of “Notes about Special Cases.” Kilner’s essay examines Casey’s collected “Notes about Special Cases” as a work of theological literature, arguing that the notebooks he kept on the people who came to him for prayer and counsel function as a modern form of Christian memoria — a communal archive of prayer, remembrance, and healing.
Second Place: Barry Mark Okeyo — a Maryknoll seminarian from Kenya pursuing a Master of Divinity at Catholic Theological Union, for his essay From Cell to Threshold: The Novitiate Formation Program of Blessed Solanus Casey and Its Living Expression in His Pastoral Ministry. Drawing on a largely overlooked notebook from Casey’s novitiate years, Okeyo argues that the formation principles Casey wrote as a young friar became the enduring structural framework of his pastoral ministry across six decades.
Third Place: dr. césar a. cruz — a Doctor of Ministry student at Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, California, for his essay The Porter and the Prisoner: Francis Solanus Casey, Israa Ja’abis and the Theology of the Door. Cruz’s essay places Casey’s vocation as monastery porter in conversation with the testimony of a Palestinian Muslim political prisoner, arguing that Casey’s ministry at the threshold finds urgent contemporary meaning in the lives of those the world has shut out.
“This year’s winning essays remind us how many fresh insights remain to be drawn from Blessed Solanus’s life,” said Rev. Edward Foley, Capuchin, chair of the essay prize jury. “From the formation notebook he kept as a young novice, to the notes he kept on the people who came to his door, to the door itself as a place where the excluded are received — these three essays each found something genuinely new to say about a man many assumed had already been fully understood. That kind of scholarship is exactly what these prizes were created to encourage.”
The winning essays were selected by a jury made up of women and men, lay people as well as clergy and religious, steeped in the spirituality of Blessed Solanus. The chair of the jury is Rev. Edward Foley, Capuchin, vice-postulator of the Cause for Canonization of Blessed Solanus Casey and award-winning author and celebrated preacher. Foley is the Duns Scotus Professor Emeritus of Spirituality and Retired Professor of Liturgy and Music at Catholic Theological Union in Chicago.
