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An out-of-season rain bathes the dark city. Inside the Knights of Columbus Museum near the train

station, a festive crowd is celebrating the publication of a brand new biography, "Parish Priest:
Father Michael McGivney and American Catholicism." The co-authors, Douglas Brinkley, the high-

profile presidential historian, and his research partner, Julie Fenster, are wrapped in a long,
chattering line of autograph seekers that constantly replenishes itself.

No one needs to ask why the authors have made this the inaugural stop on their national book tour. The answer is

evident in the museum's first gallery. It is dedicated to McGivney. He invented the Knights of Columbus. The date and

place given for its first meeting is Feb. 6, 1882, in the basement of St. Mary's Church. A century later, for their 100th
anniversary, the Knights transferred McGivney's remains from a cemetery in his hometown of Waterbury to a granite
sarcophagus inside the church.

McGivney died in 1890, just after his 38th birthday, from pneumonia perhaps brought on by exhaustion. When he was
disinterred, the Knights removed the garments he was buried in. They are now displayed in a chapel-like side gallery in the

Knights museum. Pressed under glass, McGivney's black robe looks papery. The rosary beads he clasped look like a lump
of coal speckled with blue.

The book signing is suspended for brief speeches. Introducing the authors, Supreme Knight Carl Anderson, a tall, elegant

man, cites the Chip Smith case as emblematic of McGivney's priesthood. "He wasn't afraid to go into a prison and minister
to a convicted murderer," Anderson says. "He was a man of the people who was out meeting with the people."

In her turn at the microphone, Fenster, dark-haired and animated, excites the crowd. "What this night proves is that

Father McGivney lives. He still has a parish that extended 130 years or so after his first parish," she says. Fenster defines
the parish as the worldwide one of nearly 2 million Knights and their families.

Brinkley looks more harried than his partner. Now based at Tulane University in New Orleans, he has had to set aside

work on a book about Hurricane Katrina for the McGivney tour. He says the priest was emblematic of the nation. A first
generation child of the great Irish-potato-famine migration, he came of age during a time of massive anti-Catholic, anti-Irish

prejudice. In founding the Knights and choosing Columbus as their namesake, McGivney gave millions of immigrants their
own George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. "I think he wanted to Americanize Catholics," Brinkley says.

Almost everything said during the evening about McGivney has an extra meaning that is embodied in a white-robed priest

in the museum throng. He is Father Gabriel O'Donnell, whom Fenster praises as the man who "probably knows more
about Father McGivney than Father McGivney knew."

O'Donnell has written a biography of McGivney, too. Except his is five times longer than the one written by Brinkley and

Fenster, and it is not for sale. It isn't even public. O'Donnell's biography, 1,000 pages long, is being studied in Rome. Called
a positio, it basically is an argument that McGivney deserves to be made a saint.

It talks about what he did for Chip Smith and the Knights and his relationship with God. It also is supported by a second

volume that documents a healing miracle McGivney is supposed to have accomplished sometime after his death - from
heaven.

If the positio is approved by theologians and the miracle found genuine by doctors, McGivney will be beatified. Then, with

only one more miracle, he can be canonized and called saint. Asked about McGivney's chances, O'Donnell grabs a number
out of the air. He guesses the Connecticut priest's journey to sainthood is about "sixty percent" complete.

Cause for Sainthood, New Haven, Jan. 11, 2006: