A veteran, professor and priest

Father Francis P. Duffy and the Fighting 69th

Posted at 11:35 AM ET, 11/11/2011
By Pat McNamara

With Veterans Day here, this week’s column features a priest whose statue millions pass daily in Times Square, a World War I Chaplain featured in the 1940 movie The Fighting 69th. Professor, pastor and soldier, apologist and ecumenist, Francis Duffy was, one historian writes, “the best-known priest in New York.” A transplanted Canadian, he became the quintessential New Yorker: in love with the city, and living in the very heart of it.

Born on May 2nd, 1871, Francis Patrick Duffy grew up in the town of Cobourg, one of eleven children. His parents emigrated to Canada from Ireland. After Frank finished college in Toronto, he secured a teaching job at the Jesuits’ Xavier High School in Manhattan. A year later, he began studies for the priesthood. He stayed in New York for the rest of his life.

Ordained a priest in 1896 for the New York Archdiocese, he pursued graduate studies at Catholic University in Washington, D.C. He then joined the faculty of St. Joseph’s Seminary in Yonkers, teaching philosophy for fourteen years. One student called him an “Irish Socrates, not a lecturer, but a teacher who probed the mind of each student, sometimes in a disquieting fashion.”

Although Duffy served briefly as a chaplain during the Spanish-American War, it was as a scholar that he first achieved national renown. He helped found The New York Review, perhaps the finest American Catholic theological journal of its time. For Duffy, a major challenge the church faced was “a certain intellectual sloth which masquerades as faith.” The Review featured the latest theological advances worldwide and espoused the latest biblical scholarship.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/patheos-on-faith/post/a-veteran-professor-and-priest/2011/11/11/gIQAaldKCN_blog.html

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