Book Review: Thank God Ahead of Time

Thank God Ahead of Time: The Life and Spirituality of Solanus Casey is an engaging biography of the humble Capuchin friar and Wisconsin native likely to become the first canonized male saint born in the United States. Author Michael H. Crosby, himself a Capuchin friar, has done his homework on Casey (1870 – 1957).

This biography –- now in its third edition -– describes the arc of Casey’s life in only 256 pages. Crosby quotes often from Casey’s correspondence, and sprinkles his narrative with anecdotes gleaned from interviews with those who knew him, not least the Capuchin author and EWTN mainstay, Fr. Benedict Groeschel.

In the pages of this bioography, we meet a pious Catholic of Irish descent who worked as a streetcar conductor and prison guard before entering religious life. Crosby suggests that Casey’s alleged intellectual deficits were not significant, and probably had much to do with the difficulty that almost any speaker of American English would have when studying theology in German and Latin rather than in his native tongue. Excerpts from Casey’s correspondence bolster that assertion, because Casey’s writing is straightforward, although more verbose than we are accustomed to seeing three generations later, when people tweet each other and the postal service looks for ways to close underperforming branch offices.

Any man who plays the fiddle for Jesus in front of the Blessed Sacrament at what others might call “ungodly” hours, as Casey did throughout Capuchin Franciscan friaries of New York, Michigan, and Indiana, is a man after my own heart.

Casey’s “mystic in action” approach to life involved total surrender to Christ. Accordingly, Casey was also an instrument of many healing miracles for the people around him, which Crosby treats in a refreshingly matter-of-fact way. Casey also worked miracles after his death, including at least one that Amy Welborn’s late husband blogged movingly about.

Crosby does a good job of describing Casey’s enthusiasm for enrolling people in the Seraphic Mass Association to support Capuchin missions. He also notes that Casey was a great fan of the devotional writings of the original “Blue Nun,” Mary of Agreda, (d. 1665). In fact, the English translation of Mary of Agreda’s Mystical City of God made such a positive first impression that over the course of his life, Casey nearly memorized that biography of the mother of Jesus by one of her namesakes.

You may be wondering if Crosby’s affectionate portrait of Casey has any flaws, and the answer is yes, Thank God Ahead of Time drags in some places. This occasional want of craft would be surprising, given that Crosby has more than a dozen other books to his credit, but when writing about Solanus Casey, the temptation to hagiography over which Crosby sometimes trips is understandable. Crosby sugarcoats Casey’s fierce opposition to anti-Irish policies of the British government, and struggles with mid-century (pre-Vatican II) Catholic piety. His detachment from that sensibility is evident, for example, in the awkwardness with which he notes that Capuchins used to observe the custom of kissing the floor whenever they crossed the space in front of a tabernacle.

Anyone who has not read masterworks like Donald Spoto’s Reluctant Saint: The Life of Francis of Assisi and Peter Ackroyd’s The Life of Thomas More might be more forgiving of the lapses that keep Thank God Ahead of Time from having the same “you are there” feel that classic biographies of the first rank do.

The best feature of Thank God Ahead of Time is a thirty-page chapter on the spirituality of Solanus Casey that closes the book. This alloy of Franciscan charism and Casey's own outlook is (as the book title implies) a simple spirituality of profound gratitude, and there is much there for any Christian to emulate.

Crosby hits a double rather than a home run. But in spite of its leisurely pacing and now-you-see-it, now-you-don't detatchment, this is a biography that I will happily share with the other members of a bible study group to which I belong, and I do recommend it.