NOTE: Enjoy this excerpt from The American Daily Reader, by CatholicVote president Brian Burch and Emily Stimpson Chapman. To order the complete volume, visit the CatholicVote store today!
From the start, the partnership formed by Father James Anthony Walsh and Father Thomas Frederick Price was an unlikely one.
Father Walsh was from the North, born in 1867 and raised in the Boston suburbs. Father Price, born in 1860, was from the South, the son of Catholic converts living in Wilmington, North Carolina. Father Walsh was educated at two of the best schools in the country—Boston College and Harvard. Father Price went straight to the local seminary after high school and then finished his formation in Baltimore. The urbane Father Walsh had traveled the world. Father Price spent most of his priestly life in the backwoods of North Carolina.
Despite all that divided the pair, however, the two men shared a common desire: to send American Catholics abroad to proclaim the Gospel. They discovered their shared interest after a chance encounter at the 1910 Eucharistic Congress in Montreal. Immediately, they began devising a plan to make their dream a reality. The following year, they took that plan to the U.S. bishops, who wholeheartedly endorsed it on the condition that the pope also approved.
On May 31, 1911, Fathers Walsh and Price sailed for Rome seeking his approval. A month later, Pope Pius X granted them his blessing, and the Catholic Foreign Mission Society of America officially began.
Before the year was out, the two priests had begun building a seminary on a small hill in New York known as “Mary’s Knoll.” From the hill, the fledgling society took its name.
In 1912, the order welcomed its first seminarians, and six years later, the first Maryknoll missionaries departed for China. Price was among them. Walsh remained behind to run the seminary.
At that point, the two priests’ paths once more diverged. Price never came home, dying in Hong Kong in 1919. Father Walsh became Bishop Walsh, shepherding the growth of the Maryknoll Fathers and Sisters until his death in 1936.
Today, however, both men share the same title: Servant of God.
