A saint of our own?
The humble piety of Notre Dame cobbler Brother Columba inspires a canonization push.
The “Miracle Man of Notre Dame” had been long forgotten when Brother Philip Smith, C.S.C., stumbled upon three dusty boxes in the furthest corner of the archives of the Congregation of Holy Cross Midwest Province.
Brother Philip was still learning how to be an archivist—he had taken over unexpectedly in 2019 after retiring from 50 years as a high school English and music teacher. It took him six months to figure out what was in the back store room full of moveable library shelves that can be wheeled open like parting a sea of ancient wisdom.
Four days before COVID shut down the world in March 2020, Brother Philip suddenly looked up in the last row and found the three boxes, simply labeled: Brother Columba.
“I pulled a box down, took the lid off, and began to just thumb through and saw letters, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of letters,” Brother Philip said. “Thank God for COVID because I was also given the assistance of a number of seminarians who were now twiddling their fingers and driving somebody nuts.”
What he’d discovered has grown to more than 10,000 archived items, mostly letters testifying to about 1,400 cures attributed to the intercession of a humble, barely literate, and clubfooted cobbler who made shoes for the Notre Dame community from 1885 until his death in 1923. Brother Columba had been widely known at that time for his petitions to the Sacred Heart and was glorified again in a 1950s revival that led to the naming of the residence building between the campus lakes—and then he was forgotten for about 60 years.
But thanks to Brother Philip’s archival work, Fort Wayne-South Bend Bishop Kevin Rhoades in April 2025 officially opened an inquiry into the life and holiness of Brother Columba O’Neill, C.S.C. That initiation of a cause is the first step in a lengthy process that could lead to the beatification and canonization of Notre Dame’s very first saint.
Michael Skaggs, a Catholic historian and one of three people appointed to a historical commission to write a report on Brother Columba for the Dicastery for the Causes of Saints in Rome, said Catholics would find Brother Columba a very relatable figure.
“Columba lived his entire life in service to other people in one form or another, whether it was making shoes or answering prayer requests,” Skaggs said. “I would imagine that if you could have a saint connected to your institution, that’s the kind of saint you want, especially for Notre Dame. A little humility goes a long way.”
Kathleen Sprows Cummings, Skaggs’s mentor and Notre Dame’s resident expert on American saints, agreed, comparing Brother Columba to the first Holy Cross saint, the humble Canadian doorman André Bessette. Cummings tempered expectations because there are other causes for sainthood with pressing stories to tell, but still noted how important a saint would be for the University.
“People connect to saints in lots of ways,” she said, such as through a common interest or shared avocation. “But the most powerful way is through place. The idea that someone now affirmed as a saint walked on the same exact ground that we’re walking on makes for a really profound connection. Encountering holiness in familiar places is powerful.”
Brother Columba’s life before Notre Dame
Brother Columba was born on November 5, 1848, as John O’Neill, the fifth of six children of Irish immigrants in the coal mining town of Mackeysburg, Pennsylvania. He had a “congenital foot abnormality” that made his parents baptize him quickly for fear he wouldn’t live long.
Though he worked as other local children did picking slate from the coal, he was unable to swing the mining pickax and apprenticed at age 14 to a local cobbler. While it may make sense that a person who needed special shoes would want to learn how to make them, Rev. Richard Gribble, C.S.C., said there is no clear evidence for that theory.
“I think it was absolutely providential that he was born that way because that kept him out of a life in the mines,” Father Gribble said. “But it would be just supposition to say that’s why he became a cobbler.
“One of the big problems with Brother Columba is the documentation we have is really not good —95 percent of what we have is just letters that people sent to him.”
Father Gribble moved to Notre Dame in June 2024 after retiring from teaching at Stonehill College for 27 years. The Congregation of Holy Cross asked him to write a biography about Brother Columba because he had experience writing biographies about three other people who are being considered for sainthood.
Along with Skaggs, Bishop Rhoades assigned Father Gribble and American studies professor Peter Cajka to Brother Columba’s historical commission. Their report is due in April. Father Gribble’s biography, titled Miracle Man of Notre Dame: The Life of Brother Columba O’Neill, C.S.C., could be published as soon as this summer or in early 2027.
Young John O’Neill started traveling as an itinerant cobbler during the Civil War. He later made his way west to Denver with another shoemaker. Walking with a severe limp, the long journey on foot to San Francisco in the early 1870s must have been painful, but he stopped to ply his trade in rural areas where cobblers were needed.
The brawny redhead reportedly went to daily Mass and had considered a religious vocation from the age of 14. He was rejected by one religious order in California before hearing about Notre Dame from another itinerant cobbler who studied at its Manual Labor School. He wrote to the novice master at Notre Dame, who apparently invited him to come to campus.
Much of this biographical information about Brother Columba comes from a fictionalized and unverified booklet about his life called These Two Hearts(2.1MB). But Father Gribble said the archives offer some proof because a letter writer notes she met Brother Columba when he was in Denver.
A calling at Notre Dame
John O’Neill arrived on campus on July 9, 1874, and joined the Congregation of Holy Cross as Brother Columba that September. After a novitiate year and a year in the campus cobbler shop, Brother Columba took his final vows and asked to be sent for mission work in India or with Father Damien De Veuster and the lepers on Molokai.
Instead, he and two other brothers were sent to run St. Joseph’s Orphan Asylum in Lafayette, Indiana. Brother Columba obeyed and spent nine years making shoes and caring for about 100 children there. He was asked to return to Notre Dame after he wrote that his trade was no longer necessary: “The boys have their shoes.”
He returned to the shoe shop, then located on South Quad, in 1885 and worked there for the next 38 years. His only “break” was two years spent as the primary nurse for ailing Rev. Edward Sorin, C.S.C., from 1891 until the University founder’s death on October 31, 1893.
At some unknown date, Brother Columba was sent to Chicago for a successful surgery by the renowned surgeon Nicholas Senn on his club feet, reducing his awkward shuffle to a slight limp. At another point, he was given a small statue of the Sacred Heart, which he placed in his shop with a votive candle as a devotional shrine.
Around 1890, Brother Columba began producing paper badges of the Immaculate Heart of Mary and cloth badges of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. He eventually distributed about 10,000 of the former and 30,000 of the latter. He apparently ordered inexpensive printed Sacred Heart decals from Chicago and adhered them to felt cloth that he cut with his pinking shears.
“The lore is that if you brought your shoes to the shop to be fixed, when you came to pick them up, he would only give them to you if you took the badge,” Brother Philip said.
Father Gribble said documents indicate that Brother Columba started the badge distribution after receiving a donation of $87 from a local visitor who requested he start a devotion to the Sacred Heart on campus. Popular among Irish immigrants, a devotion to the Sacred Heart focused on the physical heart of Jesus as a representation of his divine love.
Another letter, Father Gribble said, reveals a lost conflict with Rev. Andrew Morrissey, C.S.C. Father Morrissey “took all the money that people had given Brother Columba to build up a Sacred Heart shrine, and he built the original Moreau Seminary.”
As Brother Columba’s reputation for piety grew, several campus priests went to the superior to complain that the cobbler would also advise the students to go to confession.
“They said, ‘You’ve got to get Columba to stop this business of confessions—all we’re doing is hearing confessions all the time,’” Brother Philip said. “And he said, ‘I’ll be obedient, but I’m going to pray to the Sacred Heart anyway.’”
Healing ministry
A 1947 Catholic magazine article(2.9MB) relates that Brother Columba’s healing work started at the cobbler shop with a man who wanted special shoes for his disabled son. The author, Marie Lauck, wrote that the story comes from the recollections of contemporaries of Brother Columba, because “no one dreamed of making records of such a small incident.”
Brother Columba first suggested the father go to the Chicago doctor who helped him, but he was informed that the family couldn’t afford the expense because they also had an epileptic daughter. He gave the father a Sacred Heart badge for his daughter to wear, and the man returned a few weeks later to exclaim that his daughter was cured.
In about 150 letters in the archives that Brother Columba wrote, he never took any credit. He indicated that all outcomes, positive or not, were the work of the Sacred Heart of Jesus or Immaculate Heart of Mary. What is clear, Father Gribble said, is his childlike faith that God could heal people’s ailments. He unfailingly finished letters with “In kind love” before his signature.
“He wrote in a stream of consciousness,” Father Gribble said. “There’s no capitalization, there’s no periods, no commas. Every third or fourth word is misspelled. He wrote phonetically.
“From what we can tell, [he had] maybe a third-grade education, but he didn’t let any of those obstacles get in his way. You see his simplicity, his just absolute faith in the Sacred Heart and believing that if people would do what he asked, they could be cured.”
Still, word of the healing power of the humble cobbler spread quickly. First people came to the shoe shop. By 1912, letters started pouring in. About 7,500 were in the boxes Brother Philip found.
“The brothers in the post office became quite aware that Brother Columba was receiving lots of mail, maybe 20 letters a day, which would’ve been highly unusual,” Brother Philip said. By the early 1920s, he was receiving even more. “So somebody’s blown the whistle to some superior and said, ‘There’s something quite interesting going on here.’”
Letters from across the country give thanks and detail all kinds of cures. A young man with hip disease walks again and sends his crutches. A boy with lockjaw unclenches. A young girl in Iowa rose and walked after seven years of spinal trouble. The blind, deaf, and lame write to testify that they attached the badge, said their prayers, and were cured.
“It is rather remarkable to me that people would just put such trust and faith in him,” Father Gribble said.
Some writers requested prayers for a husband or brother in World War I. A mother asked that her sons would fail the physical and not join the military. Some would express gratitude for a cure from tuberculosis, while others just wanted to sell their house. When he wasn’t nursing the sick on campus, Brother Columba reportedly spent his nights responding to the letters, sending badges and saying prayers for the petitioners.
For his research article, Skaggs, the historian on Brother Columba’s commission, read hundreds of letters and discerned some patterns. Many of the writers had unartful but heartbreaking requests, generally ignoring world events in favor of personal healing. Their letters, he said, reveal a Catholic worldview that no longer exists.
“It’s this very direct model of essentially petitionary prayer,” Skaggs said. “I have a need. I’m going to pray and it’s going to get fixed. But then they will say, essentially, if you give this a shot and it doesn’t work, then I must know suffering is what my job is. That’s a different world than we live in.”
Miracles on the move
It’s natural, Father Gribble said, that Brother Columba would be compared to St. André Bessette, the first Holy Cross religious to be canonized in 2010. “They were born about the same time, and both poorly educated, simple, ordinary guys who did miraculous things,” he said.
One major difference is that while André worked exclusively in Montreal, Brother Columba traveled throughout the Midwest. People would write and request that he visit to heal their sick. He went to Chicago, Michigan, Ohio, even Dallas and Louisiana. “It was probably unusual for that time that the provincial would allow a brother to travel that extensively,” Father Gribble said. “And he would need some expenses.”
A 1918 article in the Herald-News of Joliet, Illinois(283KB), extols the fame of Brother Columba’s “faith cures.” A Protestant minister, Carl F. Bruhn, writes that Brother Columba attracted crowds to the home where he was staying, yet took no credit or compensation for any healing that might occur. Bruhn notes the restoration of speech, sight, and hearing as reported cures.
“He makes no distinction between Catholic and Protestant so far as healing is concerned,” Bruhn wrote. “He seems to be absolutely sincere and has none of the marks of the religious imposter.”
From death to obscurity
Brother Columba reportedly contracted the Spanish flu during the 1918–20 pandemic and nearly died. He never fully recovered his strength but continued his correspondence ministry with the help of some seminarian scribes until his death from flu complications in November 1923.
The letters of petition and thanks kept pouring in for at least another year. Seminarians were tasked with regularly shoveling dirt on his grave because people kept coming to scrape some off as a sacred relic.
While he was not a household name for most Americans, the South Bend Tribune (in a notice reprinted in The Scholastic(6.6MB)) called him the “Miracle Man of Notre Dame” and noted that “many of his clients loudly proclaimed that they were cured through his ministrations and assistance,” calling him a “Divine Healer.”
The provincial at the time, Rev. Charles O’Donnell, C.S.C., later a University president, gave the sermon at Brother Columba’s funeral.
“To the eyes of the world we gather merely about the mortal remains of an old man whose life was of no great moment, no special service to his fellow man. His no distinction of birth, or wealth, or education, as the world sees it. He wrote nothing, he discovered nothing, he invented nothing, he contributed nothing to the progress of mankind. He was a shoemaker by day, and sometimes a nurse by night.
“Yet his name was known to thousands ... For the past two days the faithful in a constant stream have approached his bier and touched their rosaries and medals to his hands, or stood in rapt devotion, looking at his plain and peaceful face.”
Before his death, Father O’Donnell said that Brother Columba spoke his own autobiography in just a few words: “I’ll be dying one of these days, and maybe they’ll be putting something about me in The Scholastic. You can tell them to say there was an old shoemaker at Notre Dame, and he had a devotion to the Sacred Heart, and there seem to have been some cures.”
Father O’Donnell summed up the remarkable paradox this way: “The humble shoemaker had somehow learned to mend immortal souls.”
Provincial Council meeting minutes from 1922 show that Father O’Donnell said “this brother here is doing miraculous things and we really need to do research” before he dies.
“And they didn’t do anything,” Father Gribble said. “That’s the most tragic thing about this whole story.”
And back to fame?
There was, in fact, a sincere effort by those who knew Brother Columba to restore his fame in the 1940s and 1950s. These Two Hearts, written for children and first published in 1948 by Brother Ernest Ryan, C.S.C., says there were some at Notre Dame who worried that claiming miracles would sound too ridiculous at a Catholic college still trying to gain wide acceptance.
That effort prompted Rev. George Giglinger, a parish priest in Keokuk, Iowa, to give the province about 60 letters Brother Columba had written him over the years. Brother Columba visited Keokuk often because his sister and other family moved there after his father died.
The push to canonize Brother Columba got its biggest boost when Brother Sabinas Herbert, C.S.C., who had publishing industry experience, entered the congregation and was assigned to Ave Maria Press. He helped get the brothers’ retirement residence renamed as Columba Hall. He also wrote a letter to Superior General Rev. Christopher O’Toole, C.S.C., urging him to begin the cause for canonization.
Brother Philip said Father O’Toole wrote back that Brother Columba would be the next push after Brother André Bessette and Rev. Basil Moreau, C.S.C. But then Brother Sabinas died of a stroke at age 38, and “the entire operation came to a halt.”
Six decades would pass before Brother Philip discovered the boxes of letters. Even more serendipitously, he accidentally found Brother Columba’s cobbler tools in the Columba Hall library. “I was up there looking for something else, and I’m reaching way back in this shelf and I feel this box,” Brother Philip said. “It says ‘Tools—Brother Columba,’ and I thought ‘Holy mother of God.’”
After organizing the letters chronologically and finding verification for cures mentioned in Brother Ernest’s book, Brother Philip called Bishop Rhoades, who visited the archives in July 2021. The bishop was supportive, asking Brother Philip to become the postulator of the cause and write a formal petition, known as a libellus, to initiate the process of canonization.
In Catholicism, canonization affirms holiness rather than creates it; the multistage process affirms that a person is close to God and can act as an intermediary in prayers. Bishop Rhoades’s opening of an inquiry last April officially recognized the cobbler as Servant of God Brother Columba. More difficult steps follow.
The canonization process
One of the biggest obstacles to overcome is that no one at Notre Dame now knew who Brother Columba was. Cummings, the Notre Dame professor, spent a decade researching American saints for her 2019 book, A Saint of Our Own: How the Quest for a Holy Hero Helped Catholics Become American. She’d never heard of Brother Columba, and not a single person mentioned him despite knowing her project.
“Promoters of a saint’s cause have to make a case for continuous devotion to the person, so I’m wondering how Rome will react to Brother Columba’s case,” Cummings said. “With canonization, we must ask: Why this person and not others? The answer has to do with who has the power, influence, and resources to promote a saint. But it’s also about how the person fulfills a need in culture or matches a moment in a really particular way.”
Her book is an American history told through canonization, because promoting a saint’s cause tells you as much about the people promoting it as about the holy person themselves. “So if you can figure out who are the heroes at any given time, you learn about the values of the society,” she said.
For example, Carlo Acutis, a 15-year-old canonized in September, was publicized as the first millennial or gamer saint. That cause intentionally targeted younger Catholics. So what about Brother Columba?
“I think the case for relevance is going to be a hard sell, especially with some of the really compelling possible American saints out there,” said Cummings, one of the only Catholic prognosticators to give Pope Leo XIV a shot during the last conclave. “I think of Dorothy Day, for example.”
In the rest of the process, Cummings said historical and religious commissions submit reports to Rome, which are then vetted before a person can be declared “Venerable.” Then the search for cures with no medical explanation begins, with only one miracle needed to achieve beatification and the title “Blessed.” Another is needed after that point for the final step in canonization. Cummings said she could see one way to make a case.
“We always talk about Father Sorin as Notre Dame’s founder,” she said. “But it was the brothers and the sisters that did a lot of the real grunt work here in the 19th century when Notre Dame was in a very precarious place. And so if Columba’s canonization would be a way to teach people about the role that they played, I’m all for it.”
For Brother Philip, the veneration he’s already seeing has made his efforts worthwhile. He said he recently took a woman from Colorado to Brother Columba’s grave. She began putting grave dirt in plastic bags to send to her relatives.
Brother Philip also pitched a film documentary on Brother Columba to Sister Judy Zielinski after seeing her documentary on Servant of God Sister Thea Bowman. The 45-minute film titled In Kind Love has led to a resurgence in interest that has put Brother Philip in a full-circle but welcome predicament.
“Now I get phone calls and I get little emails from people saying, ‘I recently saw this, and so can you give me a Sacred Heart badge?’” he said. “I hadn’t distributed a Sacred Heart badge in 50 years. Last week alone, I sent out over 200.”