Thomas Frederick Price was an American Roman Catholic priest, editor, and missionary.
Background
He was born on August 19, 1860 in Wilmington, North Carolina, United States, where his father published the Wilmington Journal (1848 - 72). His parents were Alfred Lanier and Clarissa (Bond) Price.
The Prices were of old Carolinian stock, proud of their ancestors' service in the War of Independence. The father, until shortly before his death when he joined the Catholic Church, was an Episcopalian; but his wife, converted from Methodism and disinherited by her family, was a devout Catholic and reared her ten children accordingly.
Education
Trained in Catholic schools, Thomas, intending to continue his education, took passage (September 16, 1876) from Wilmington to Baltimore, but the ship he was on sank and he was almost miraculously rescued. This escape and the long fever which followed intensified his religious fervor. A few months later, he enrolled at St. Charles' College, Ellicott City, Maryland, where he was graduated in 1881. He studied theology at St. Mary's Seminary, Baltimore.
Career
He received the deaconate at the hands of Cardinal Gibbons, whose Mass he had served as a boy when Gibbons was in North Carolina. On June 30, 1886, he was ordained in Wilmington by Bishop H. P. Northrop and assigned to missionary work in the eastern section of his native state. He understood the Southern people, won the respect of the backwoodsmen, and was held in warm regard by the negroes, in whose conversion he was especially interested.
About 1896 he founded Truth, an apologetic magazine, which in the beginning he printed in the kitchen of his Raleigh rectory. This publication remained under his editorship until 1911. In 1897 he established, near Nazareth, an orphanage for boys under the direction of the Sisters of Charity, and in connection therewith founded an Apostolate, where with a few clerical associates he lived a community life and undertook to train neophytes for the domestic missions.
At the Eucharistic Congress, in 1910, Price met the Rev. James Anthony Walsh, director of the Propagation of the Faith in Boston and editor of The Field Afar (1907), and determined to join forces with him in the establishment of the first American Catholic foreign missionary society. The project was approved by the archbishops (1911), and Price went to Rome and obtained Papal sanction.
While on this journey he spent some time in Lourdes with the brother of Bernadette Soubirous, a life of whom he later translated from the French and published (1915), under the nom de plume J. H. Gregory. This work and The Lily of Mary (1918), a translation of a shorter life of Bernadette of Lourdes, comprised his literary output. Soon the Catholic Foreign Mission Society of America was established temporarily at Hawthorne, New York.
Price assisted in establishing a preparatory seminary near Scranton. (1916), and a Maryknoll Procure in San Francisco (1917). In 1918, when a band of young priests were prepared for Yeungkong mission in China, Price begged to go as a stabilizing leader, and his petition was granted. Although rather old for this rigorous life and unable to learn Chinese, he contributed the inspired zeal of a visionary to the cause. Stricken with acute appendicitis while alone, he managed to reach St. Paul's Hospital in Hongkong, where he died.
Achievements
Thomas Frederick Price was the American co-founder of the Catholic Foreign Mission Society of America. He was a famous pastor of St. Paul's Church in New Bern and of the Sacred Heart Church in Raleigh, who preached missions throughout the state, built churches or chapels at Goldsboro, Chinquapin, Halifax, Newton Grove, and Nazareth. He also was the founder and editor of Truth, an apologetic magazine. Besides, he established an orphanage for boys (near Nazareth) under the direction of the Sisters of Charity.
Personality
As a preacher, he was grave and sincere; and as a man, he led a life of simple, devoted sacrifice and of mortification.
