Three graduate students awarded as winners of the 2025-26 Blessed Solanus Casey Essay Prize, uncovering new insights
DETROIT — Blessed Solanus Casey is one of the most well-known and loved figures in American Catholicism.
And yet, there is still so much to learn about him.
Three graduate students have been recognized as the winners of the 2025-26 Blessed Solanus Casey Essay Prize, the second annual competition hosted by the Capuchin Franciscan Province of St. Joseph in order to “stimulate fresh interest” in the “American blessed.”
Started during the 2024-25 academic year, the Capuchins invited graduate students in the United States of any discipline to submit their unpublished work exploring the significance of Blessed Solanus Casey to American society and Christianity. Scholars were required to rely on primary sources, namely the writings of Blessed Solanus Casey, in order to break new ground in the study of the beloved Capuchin.
Unlike the inaugural contest, this year, the Capuchins awarded cash prizes to each of the top three essayists, rather than a single winner. The essays were selected by a jury of clergy, religious and lay scholars, chaired by the current vice-postulator for Blessed Solanus Casey's canonization cause, Fr. Edward Foley, OFM Cap.
"This year's winning essays remind us how many fresh insights remain to be drawn from the life and ministry of Blessed Solanus," Fr. Foley said. "From the formation notebook he kept as a young novice, to the notes he kept on the people who came to his door, to the door itself as a place where the excluded are received, these three essays each found fresh insights about a man many assumed had already been fully understood. That kind of scholarship is exactly what these prizes were intended to foster."
First place went to laywoman Kaile Kilner for her essay, "Written on the Heart: Blessed Solanus Casey's Embodiment of 'Notes about Special Cases.’” Kilner’s essay examines the extensive collection of Blessed Solanus’ notebooks, in which he tracked decades of encounters with the people who came to him for prayer, “as a work of theological literature in its own right.”
“Drawing on the medieval traditions of the libri vitae and libri miraculorum (books of life and books of miracles), Kilner argues that Casey's 'Notes' function as a modern form of Christian memoria, a communal archive of prayer, remembrance, and healing that invites readers into Casey's own practice of intercession through their own witness and prayer,” the Capuchins shared in a press release.
Kilner is currently pursuing her master's in theology at the Catholic Theological Union in Chicago, and holds a Master of Arts in Publishing Media from Oxford Brookes University, a Bachelor of Arts in Arabic and International Relations from Ohio State University, and works as an editorial project coordinator at World Book in Chicago.
Second place went to Barry Mark Okeyo, a Maryknoll seminarian from Kenya, for his essay titled, “From Cell to Threshold: The Novitiate Formation Program of Blessed Solanus Casey and Its Living Expression in His Pastoral Ministry."
Okeyo’s essay relies on “a largely overlooked primary source,” a handwritten notebook that belonged to Blessed Solanus during his novitiate. In the notebook, the young friar lays out five formation principles he titled, “Means for Acquiring the Love of God." Okeyo argues that these principles laid the groundwork for Solanus’ lifelong pastoral ministry as the porter at St. Bonaventure Monastery.
Prior to seminary, Okeyo earned a diploma in philosophy from Tangaza University in Nairobi and a bachelor's in political science and public administration from the University of Nairobi.
Third place was awarded to Dr. César A. Cruz for his essay "The Porter and the Prisoner: Francis Solanus Casey, Israa Ja'abis and the Theology of the Door."
Cruz examines Blessed Solanus’ ministry as a porter in alignment with the testimony of Israa Ja'abis, a Palestinian Muslim woman held as a political prisoner, whom Cruz heard speak at an event in April 2026.
“Drawing on frameworks of lament, counterstory, and the Islamic concept of sabr (patient endurance), and on his own life story as an undocumented immigrant and the son of a deported mother, Cruz argues that Solanus Casey's ministry at the threshold finds its most urgent contemporary meaning in the lives of those the world has shut out,” the Capuchins said.
Cruz is a Doctor of Ministry student at Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, California, and holds an Ed.L.D. from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, making him the first Mexican immigrant man to earn that degree. He is the co-founder and executive director of Homies Empowerment, a grassroots organization in East Oakland, California.
The Province of St. Joseph said it encourages the three winners to publish their essays, and is willing to assist in that effort, with the eventual hope of publishing the essays side-by-side in a book.
