Parent Category: Maryknoll News
Category: Society Centennial
Created on 23 December 2010
Last Updated on 12 July 2012
Published on 23 December 2010
When Father James Anthony Walsh, along with several other priests, founded the Catholic Foreign Mission Bureau during 1907, his aim was to awaken the role of mission within the United States Catholic Church. In many ways, cultivating mission as a responsibility among U.S. Catholics was a bold and innovative move, because during those early days of the last century the Church still looked at the United States, with its waves of immigration, as fertile territory for missioners from Europe.
James Walsh was born to middle-class parents (James Walsh and Hanna Shea) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on February 24, 1867. After attending public elementary school, he graduated from Boston College High School with skills in debating and journalism. He attended Boston College but later transferred to Harvard College to study bookkeeping. Studies were completed at St. John’s Seminary in nearby Brighton.
At the seminary, Father Walsh was inspired by a rector, a Sulpician (a society of secular priests founded during 15thcentury France) whose classmate in Paris, Theophane Venard, had died as a famous martyr in Indochina. A decade after his 1892 ordination at the Cathedral of the Holy Cross, Father Walsh retraced Venard’s steps in France along with those of other French martyrs, and he became convinced that the blood of martyrs is the seed of the church.
Father Walsh served as curate at St. Patrick’s Church in Roxbury until he was appointed diocesan director of theSociety for the Propagation of the Faith during 1903. Among his responsibilities was to raise money to support overseas mission, and during this time, he began to develop his vision, a modernized version of mission, for a mature U.S. Church that was eager to fulfill exciting and joyful missionary responsibilities around the world.
Along with the Catholic Foreign Mission Bureau, Father Walsh founded The Field Afar magazine, a monthly publication about the foreign missions of the Catholic Church. Years later, this magazine would become the Maryknollmagazine that continues to be published today (along with its bilingual counterpart Revista Maryknoll) by the Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers.
During 1910, at the 21st Eucharistic Conference in Montreal, Father Walsh shared his vision of U.S. Catholic mission with Father Thomas Frederick Price of North Carolina. Realizing they shared a common call to mission, the urbane Father Walsh and the more rural Father Price collaborated on plans for a mission society within the U.S. Catholic Church. Soon after, the bishops of the United States formally sanctioned the pursuit of their vision to recruit, send and support U.S. missioners around the world.
With this approval, Father Walsh and Father Price traveled to Rome to present their vision of mission. They received theblessing of Pope Pius X on June 29, 1911 (the feast of Saints Peter and Paul), which is the founding day of the Catholic Foreign Mission Society of America that, over the years, has become more well-known as Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers.
Father Walsh was a model priest and a natural leader. He was the first Superior General of the Society, the treasurer, theeditor of its publication, rector of the seminary, spiritual director of the Maryknoll Sisters that was formed during 1912, along with master organizer, fundraiser, publicist and overseer of plans and building for the Society. It is difficult to find any aspect of the foundation of Maryknoll that did not benefit from the direction and oversight of Father Walsh.
Father Walsh’s contributions to the Catholic Church in the U.S. and to the growth of mission were celebrated when he was ordained as bishop on June 29, 1933 by Pope Pius XI in Rome. Only a few years later, on April 14, 1936, Bishop Walsh passed away.
At that time, Father James Edward Walsh, one of the first seminarians at Maryknoll who was to become the founder’s successor as Superior General and later a bishop, provided a description of Bishop James A. Walsh that could classify him as Maryknoll’s Renaissance Man. He said Bishop James A. Walsh was “a business man, a literary man, an executive officer, a household manager, a family father, a spiritual shaper and leader and something of a peerer into thefuture….he was the initiator, promoter, organizer and administrator…and he was all these things at a time when help was scarce, helpers few.”
Learn more about Father James A. Walsh and the centennial celebration of Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers by visiting www.maryknollsociety.org.To receive a copy of Maryknoll magazine’s January/February issue that features Father Walsh and “Boston’s Gift to Mission,” contact Maryknoll toll-free at 1-888-627-9566.
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For February: Prayers From Father Thomas Frederick Price