Background

John LaFarge was born in Newport, Rhode Island, the tenth and youngest child of John LaFarge and Margaret Mason Perry. His father, a Roman Catholic and son of a French immigrant, was a celebrated artist and writer. His mother, an Episcopalian convert to Catholicism, was the granddaughter of Oliver Hazard Perry. He was born into the social and intellectual elite of New England.

Education

LaFarge was educated in the public schools of Newport and, later, by private tutors in New York City. He was a precocious and introspective youth, and a voracious reader with a talent for music and a facility for languages. By the age of twelve he had decided to become a priest. On the advice of Theodore Roosevelt, a family friend, LaFarge decided against Columbia and Georgetown and entered Harvard in 1897. In preparation for the priesthood, he majored in Latin and Greek, studied Semitic languages, and pursued advanced work in piano and organ. Harvard, though, was a disappointment to LaFarge. He found his professors narrow and uninspiring, and the university indifferent to religion and lacking in pastoral care for Catholic students. After receiving his B. A. in 1901, he sailed for Europe to pursue theological studies at the University of Innsbruck, Austria. In Europe he traveled extensively, and became fluent in German, as well as French and Latin. Later he studied scholastic philosophy at Woodstock College in Maryland, receiving an M. A. in 1910.

Career

In January 1905 he decided to become a Jesuit. He was ordained in the university church in Innsbruck in July 1905 and entered the Jesuit novitiate at St. Andrew-on-Hudson in Poughkeepsie, New York, the following November. He taught humanities briefly in 1907 at Canisius College, Buffalo, New York, and in 1908 at Loyola College, Baltimore.

But the demands of graduate work proved too strenuous for his fragile constitution, and in late 1910 he reluctantly abandoned the prospect of an academic career. In hope of recovering his health, he accepted assignment to pastoral work. In September 1911, after eight months as a chaplain in hospitals and penal institutions in New York City, LaFarge was transferred to the Jesuit missions in southern Maryland. For the next fifteen years (except in 1917-1918, when he served his Jesuit tertianship at St. Andrew-on-Hudson) he served rural parishes in St. Mary's County, at the Church of St. Aloysius in Leonardtown, and after September 1915, at St. Inigoes Manor, near St. Mary's City. Confronted for the first time with the problems of rural life, racial discrimination, and the poverty and neglect of black people, LaFarge became preoccupied with the question of racism.

Increasingly active in attempts to improve race relations, he saw his early efforts come to fruition in October 1924 with the founding of the Cardinal Gibbons Institute, a black secondary school near Ridge, Md. In August 1926 LaFarge returned to New York City to become an associate editor of America, the influential Jesuit weekly magazine, which he served for the rest of his life, including a period as executive editor (1942 - 1944) and editor in chief (1944 - 1948).

An accomplished linguist (familiar with Polish, Russian, and Slovak) and a prolific writer, he covered a broad range of subjects in his articles and editorials but devoted special attention to racial problems, the liturgical arts, Slavic affairs, rural life, European events, and communism. Prominent in the National Catholic Rural Life Conference, the Liturgical Arts Society, the Catholic Association for International Peace, and a host of other organizations, he was especially active in those devoted to the betterment of race relations. For a time he worked closely with the Federated Colored Catholics, and he was instrumental in founding the Catholic Laymen's Union of New York (1928) and the Catholic Interracial Council of New York (1934), which served as a model for the establishment of similar councils in other cities.

By the time his most important book, Interracial Justice, was published, LaFarge had become the leading American Catholic spokesman on the race question. While in Europe in 1938 he was asked by Pope Pius XI to draft an encyclical on racism. For three months in Paris LaFarge and two Jesuit colleagues labored in secret on the draft, but because of the death of the pope soon afterward, the encyclical was never issued. He was fiercely dedicated to the institutional church and to the papacy. In addition to his work as a journalist, LaFarge wrote ten books, including a delightful autobiography, The Manner Is Ordinary (1954). He died in New York City at Campion House, the editorial headquarters of America, where he had lived for thirty-seven years.

Achievements

• John Lafarge has been listed as a noteworthy clergyman, editors by Marquis Who's Who.

Works

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• book

  • The Race Question And The Negro: A Study Of The Catholic Doctrine On Interracial Justice

    (This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of th...)

  • The Catholic Viewpoint on Race Relations

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  • Interracial Justice: A Study of the Catholic Doctrine of Race Relations
  • Reflections on Growing Old

Personality

LaFarge was tall and slightly stooped in appearance, gentle and conciliatory in manner, optimistic in outlook, and moderate and practical in action.

Connections

Father:

John LaFarge

Artist, writer

Mother:

Margaret Mason Perry

Great-grandfather:

Oliver Hazard Perry

References

• The Manner is Ordinary
• John Lafarge, Gentle Jesuit
• John Lafarge and the Limits of Catholic Interracialism, 1911--1963