Jesauit Said "The Idea Of Being A Priest Came To Me Naturally."

Monday, Mar. 03, 1952

Reasoned Optimist

John LaFarge, S.J. has worked out for himself the well-balanced combination of faith and reason which St. Thomas Aquinas made the Roman Catholic ideal. He holds deep religious and social convictions but has seldom been known to raise his voice in argument. As a religious journalist, in a field overripe with invective, he has kept his arguments lean, prudent and confidently patient. As he once wrote, "I am not so much trying to persuade people to walk on a certain road, as I am to show them the road that I am convinced they are sooner or later going to walk on."

In Manhattan this week, Father LaFarge, 72, a tall, stooping man with a face of benign granite, got a dinner in his honor.

The occasion: the celebration of his 25 years as an editor of the Jesuit weekly America (including four years as editor-in-chief). ("Good Old Days")

Besides fellow priests and other Catholic dignitaries, the program listed such non-Catholics as the Rev. Samuel McCrea Cavert of the National Council of Churches, Chancellor Louis Finkelstein of Jewish Theological Seminary and President A. Philip Randolph of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. They were all friends of a priest who has been a powerful one-man social-action movement outside his church as well as in it.

It Came Naturally. John LaFarge was born into both the Social Register and the Catholic Church. His father John was a famous American artist.* His mother was a granddaughter of Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry, and a direct descendant of Benjamin Franklin. He grew up in a cultivated literary and artistic world not remarkable for its piety. Both his parents, however, were attentive Catholics, and from boyhood, as John LaFarge remembers, "the idea of being a priest came to me naturally." He did not let his secular education (Harvard '01) nor his promise as a concert pianist interfere. At 21, he went to Innsbruck to study for the priesthood.

After his ordination, he transferred to the Jesuit order, even though it meant starting over again as a novice. In 1911 his superiors sent him to take charge of some rundown Jesuit mission parishes in southern Maryland, with mixed Negro and white congregations. The 15 years he spent there introduced him to a major interest—helping the American Negro in his fight for equality. "I became aware," he recalls, "of the harmful effects of slavery's psychological heritage." The articles he wrote from his experiences impressed his superiors so much that he was eventually transferred to the staff of America.

As a full-time journalist, Father La-Farge became an almost full-time spokesman for Negro rights. In 1934 he was a leader in founding the first Catholic Interracial Council in the U.S. In 1942 he was the only white speaker at the Madison Square Garden rally launching the drive for the Fair Employment Practices Commission. He has shown a constant concern for the progress of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters.

An Agonizing School. LaFarge had other interests besides interracial justice.

He is a recognized authority on the Papal encyclicals. Since 1920, when he found Communists among some Slovak immigrant parishioners, he has written and lectured about the dangers of Communist ideology.

He has been a leader of the Liturgical Arts Society, an organization founded to raise the low level of religious art in the U.S. A brilliant linguist, he knows a dozen languages* besides Greek, Latin and Hebrew ("Those are normal").

A peculiar gift of Father LaFarge's is his ability to get along with his opposite numbers in other religions. He likes to call organizations such as the Interracial Council "open," i.e., welcoming cooperation with other religious groups in the same field. "Union between men of different beliefs on the great basic truths of morality and religion," he says, "I consider our principal defense in the ideological field today."

Urbane and good-humored for all his zeal, Father LaFarge shies away from the title of crusader. The "one-track crusader," he concedes, has his place. He would rather be a "reasoned optimist." Says John LaFarge: "The world, as I see it, is a vast and agonizing school in the science of human unity. No all-inclusive program can be bulled through, but innumerable detailed and specific approaches can be made. Our mistake is neglecting the possible in our despair over the impossible. That, as St. Thomas Aquinas would say, is against the virtue of practical reason."

*A tradition carried on by two other sons, Artist Bancel LaFarge and Architect Christopher Grant LaFarge. Two grandsons: Author Christopher LaFarge (Laughing Boy), Author and Indian Expert Oliver LaFarge. *French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Russian, Polish, Czech, Slovak, Danish, Dutch and Esperanto.

Link to the Time Magazine article (here)