Drawing from St. Francis' Canticle of Creation, Bro. Gaffney's statue invites visitors to contemplate, not fear, death
DETROIT — In mid-July, the Solanus Casey Center installed a new statue in its garden space depicting "Sister Death," from St. Francis of Assisi’s famous Canticle of Creation, a work of the late Capuchin Bro. Michael Gaffney.
Bro. Gaffney, who died in 2023, created the bronze-cast statue in 2007 in commemoration of the 150th anniversary of the founding of the Capuchin order in the United States. The statue was originally designed for the Capuchin cemetery in Mount Calvary, Wisconsin, and a second statue was commissioned for the Capuchin cemetery in Yonkers, New York. The third and final statue was made for St. Bonaventure Monastery and the Solanus Casey Center in Detroit, Bro. Steven Kropp, OFM Cap., told Detroit Catholic.
The life-size statue depicts "Sister Death" embracing a friar who is deceased, Bro. Kropp explained.
“I hope some people get some solace from the statue,” Bro. Kropp said. “She is in a somewhat secluded place, and maybe it can be a quiet place for someone to just go and sit and pray and remember someone they’ve lost and find a little solace in looking at Sister Death lovingly embracing one who is dying.”
Bro. Kropp, who served as the director of the Solanus Casey Center for four years until June 1, when he became the pastor of the Capuchin parishes on the Crowe Reservation in southeast Montana, said the installation honors the memory of Bro. Gaffney.
“I lived with him when he was creating this for the installation in 2007, and because it is so large, he didn’t have a place to work on it, so he would go to spend time every day at the foundry where he created the clay mold to make the cast,” Bro. Kropp said. “It was a very long process and a work of love for him to create this. In all of his art, and this piece in particular, he put a lot of himself into it — his own feelings and emotions. I’m sure as he was creating it, he was remembering the hundreds of friars that he knew who had gone before him.”
The Sister Death statue was a significant piece for Bro. Gaffney, who knew the Solanus Casey Center, in partnership with the St. Bonaventure Secular Franciscan order, was in the process of commissioning one for Detroit before he passed away.
“I am sure had he been able to be here alive today to see it, it would have been an incredible moment for him,” Bro. Kropp said.
Bro. Kropp said the Sister Death statue in Detroit was intentionally placed on a lower platform than the one in Wisconsin so pilgrims and visitors could feel emboldened to approach and engage with it.
“We wanted people to be able to interact with it, including young people and children, to come up to the statue and touch it and experience it,” Bro. Kropp explained.
By interacting with the statue of Sister Death, Bro. Kropp hopes pilgrims will view death as St. Francis did — not something to be feared, but something to embrace.
“St. Francis wrote the canticle throughout his entire later life after his conversion,” Bro. Kropp said. “He wrote the verse about peace when he was concerned about war between Assisi and Perugia; he wrote the verse about Sister Death when he was near death. I think Francis, both for himself and for his brothers and others, really wanted us to be able to see that death was not something to be feared, but something to be embraced as a sister or a mother coming to embrace you and take you to the next part of your Christian journey.
“For Francis, it was deeply personal as he was approaching death, and he wanted his brothers and sisters to see, ‘This is how I feel about my impending death,'" Bro. Kropp added. "'It’s going to feel like getting an embrace from a sister who is going to lead me across into the next life.’”
