Solanus Casey was just a simple man, a simple priest—not a man of letters, not a man of degrees—yet his thought reached to profound poetic and theological depths. Like a prophet, he was a man with a message for the future. That’s what the bishop of Marquette, Michigan, the Most Reverend Thomas L. Noa, said when he learned of his death in 1957: “Father Solanus has a message for the people of God.” The message—always based in faith and trust in God, always consoling and encouraging, and bringing peace into troubled hearts—is embodied in the new and radical definition of religion Solanus devised: “Religion is the science of our happy relationship with, and dependence upon, God and our neighbor.” He was profoundly aware of that relationship and dependence—that science—which continually unfolded in his own life.
—from the book Gratitude and Grit: The Life of Blessed Solanus Casey,
by Brother Leo Wollenweber, OFM Cap, page 1
