Learn to Know Mary

Father Solanus Guild Reflection by Br. Dan Crosby, OFM Cap. – May 11, 2026

It’s May! Most of us look forward to and love this month. Spring is really here with the splendor and fragrance of budding trees and blooming flowers, longer days and warmer sunshine, Mother’s Day with its tender memories – and the whole month is dedicated to Mary, our Blessed Mother!

Blessed Solanus, too, must have loved this month. From his earliest years on the banks of the Mississippi, his parents taught him true devotion to Our Lady. One of his earliest memories was his family’s regular night prayer in their three-room log cabin.  Every evening at 7:00 p.m. his father, Barney Casey, would ring a bell to call all the children (and often neighbor children) inside to kneel and pray the rosary together. This practice continued throughout his life. Every night of his life, he would kneel at his bedside to pray the rosary.

It was also our Blessed Mother who brought him his Capuchin vocation, which he had originally resisted!  Convinced that God was calling him to priesthood but failing to meet the academic standards of Milwaukee’s St. Francis de Sales Seminary, he returned home to Superior Wisconsin and began a novena to prepare for Mary’s feast of the Immaculate Conception, begging for direction. On the feast itself (Dec. 8) he tells us he had a “profound experience of the Blessed Mother” and heard three words: “Go to Detroit.” While in Milwaukee, he had visited the Capuchins but had not been impressed by their beards, austerity and German-speaking. The visit taught him, though, that Detroit was where a young man would go if he had a call to Capuchin life. After hearing these words Barney Jr – like Mary who “set out in haste” to go to Elizabeth after hearing from the angel that she was pregnant – immediately began preparations to “go to Detroit” and start his Capuchin life, a vocation he quickly came to love and appreciate.

Throughout his life, love for Mary and devotion to her grew only richer and deeper. Never did his devotion remain just a matter of words alone, whether praying the rosary or “The Little Office of the Blessed Virgin” (which he did for many years). He would later write: “Learn to know Mary, so that you might learn to love heaven and heavenly things.” To one of his nieces he wrote: ”Study our Blessed Mother’s life and try to imitate her peerless practice of the Christian virtues – or any one of them.”

In this (and other ways) Blessed Solanus seems to have anticipated the theology and spirituality reflected in the Fathers of the Second Vatican Council. In the Constitution on the Church they say:

Let the faithful remember that true devotion to Mary consists neither in sterile nor transitory affection, nor in a certain vain credulity, but proceeds from true faith, by which we are led to recognize the excellence of the Mother of God, and are moved to a filial love toward our mother and to the imitation of her virtues.

With Blessed Solanus to guide us then, let us rejoice in the beauty of Mary’s month of May. Let us not only offer prayers in her memory but learn from her life, the powerful example and words she gives us in the Gospel. This is what Blessed Solanus did throughout his life, and this is what brings her true honor and glory.

“Learn to KNOW MARY, so that you might learn to love heaven and heavenly things.”