Edmund Aloysius Walsh (October 10, 1885 – October 31, 1956)Fr. Edmund Walsh was an American Roman Catholic priest of the Society of Jesus and career diplomat from South Boston, Massachusetts. He was also a professor of geopolitics and founder of the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service, the first school for international affairs in the United States. He founded the school in 1919, six years before the U.S. Foreign Service existed, and served as its first regent.
After experiencing Soviet anti-religious persecution through his role as the head of the American and Papal humanitarian missions during the Russian famine of 1921, Walsh became widely known as a public intellectual who spoke and wrote extensively about intolerant Marxist-Leninist atheism, the Gulag, Soviet war crimes, and other human rights abuses, and as a rhetorician who supported international religious freedom and the rule of law.
In addition to his role as an investigator of Nazi war crimes and religious persecution while working as an assistant to Robert H. Jackson during the Nuremberg trial, Walsh played a major role in raising public awareness of human rights abuses under both Far Left and Far Right police states.
Fr. Walsh was a confidant of multiple Presidents and other senior members of America's traditionally anti-Catholic White Anglo-Saxon Protestant elite, at a time when both Catholics and Americans of White ethnic ancestry were still being denied social acceptance in the United States.
More than a decade after his death, Walsh became famous once again, when he was alleged by Roy Cohn to have been the man whose opinion Senator Joseph McCarthy from Wisconsin had first sought before going public with allegations provided by U.S. counterintelligence that the Soviet Union's KGB and the GRU had recruited moles throughout the U.S. Federal Government and propagandists throughout the entertainment industry. Cohn denied knowing anything further about the alleged conversation between Senator McCarthy and Walsh, or what advice if any Walsh provided.O'Neill, Paul R. and Paul K. Williams, "Georgetown University"
Some historians claim that Walsh, rather than Senator McCarthy, deserves to be remembered as the greatest American Catholic anti-communist of the 20th century."The Argument of Strength Justly and Righteously Employed": Edmund A. Walsh, Catholic Anticommunism, and American Foreign Policy, 1945-1952 by Patrick J. MacNamara, U.S. Catholic Historian, Fall 2004. Pages 57-77.
Early life and education Walsh was born on October 10, 1885, in South Boston, Massachusetts. The youngest of six siblings, his father, John Francis Walsh, was a career police officer in the Boston Police Department, and his mother, Catherine J. (née Noonan) Walsh, emigrated from Ireland to the United States with her family as a young girl. Walsh grew up in South Boston, where one of his childhood friends included his future Jesuit colleague, Louis J. Gallagher.
Walsh first attended a public grammar school, before receiving a scholarship to attend Boston College High School in 1898. After his graduation in 1902, he decided to enter the Society of Jesus, matriculating at the Jesuit novitiate in Frederick, Maryland, on August 14 of that year. When the novitiate relocated from Frederick to St. Andrew-on-Hudson in Poughkeepsie, New York, in January 1903, Walsh moved with it. He professed his first vows there in 1904, and then began three years of philosophical studies at Woodstock College in Maryland.
From 1909 to 1912, during his Jesuit formation, Walsh taught literature at what was then the preparatory division of Georgetown University. He was present at the dedication of the statue of John Carroll on Georgetown's campus in May 1912, and was influenced by Chief Justice Edward Douglas White's speech about the common principles underlying the founding of the United States and Georgetown University. Walsh was awarded a Bachelor of Arts degree from Georgetown.
In September 1912, the Jesuit superiors sent Walsh to Europe for graduate studies. He began to study the classics at University College Dublin, but he was forced to withdraw because the academic senate declined to recognize his bachelor's degree from Georgetown. In March 1913, he began a similar program at the University of London. However, several months later, the Jesuit provincial superior directed Walsh to commence his theological studies, which he began in September of that year at the University of Innsbruck.
In August 1914, with the outbreak of the First World War, Walsh's studies there were interrupted. He instead returned to Woodstock College to continue his theological studies. He was ordained a priest on June 28, 1916, and then spent one year engaged in pastoral work in New York City. Walsh then returned to Woodstock to complete his theological studies, and was awarded a Master of Arts degree.
He later received a D.Litt. from Georgetown University, as well as an LL.D. from the University of Delaware.
Georgetown University On May 5, 1918, Walsh became the prefect of studies (dean) of the Georgetown University College of Arts & Sciences, succeeding John B. Creeden. Walsh held this position only for one year, and was succeeded by W. Coleman Nevils. In 1919, given the Jesuits' recently established policy that the deans and presidents of all Jesuit colleges should possess doctorates, Walsh was awarded an honorary Doctor of Philosophy degree from Georgetown.
During World War I he served special duties as assistant educational director to the "Students' Army Training Corps."
After the Armistice of November 11, 1918, Georgetown University established a School of Foreign Service and appointed Walsh to lead it. The school, which was the first of its kind, was intended to advance international peace by training diplomats, businessmen, bankers, and merchants with an education focused on international relations.https://www.library.georgetown.edu/exhibition/house-walsh-built-century-georgetowns-school-foreign-service The House That Walsh Built University president John B. Creeden employed Walsh as the school's first Regent. Classes began in October 1919.https://www.library.georgetown.edu/exhibition/house-walsh-built-century-georgetowns-school-foreign-service The House That Walsh Built: Speeches from the Formal Commemoration of the Founding of the School of Foreign Service, November 25, 1919 and the first class graduated in 1921.https://www.library.georgetown.edu/exhibition/house-walsh-built-century-georgetowns-school-foreign-service The House That Walsh Built: Program from Dinner for the First Graduating Class, 1921 After founding the school, Walsh continued to lead the school for several decades: his leadership of the school coincided with a high point in the American study of geopolitics, in parallel to the work of Isaiah Bowman and Nicholas Spykman. The School of Foreign Service was named for him in 1958, shortly after his death.
Relief missions to Russia
In 1922, while studying political science, Walsh received appointment as Catholic representative to the American Relief Administration, also known as the "Hoover Mission", during the Russian famine of 1921. Walsh arrived in Moscow in March 1922 to serve the mission. In June 1922, however, Pope Pius XI also appointed Walsh as director general of the Papal Relief Mission, during which time he "conducted extensive negotiations with the Soviet leaders of that time on behalf of Catholic interests in Russia."
Upon his arrival in Russia, Fr. Walsh began friendships and close collaboration in famine relief work with the main leaders of the Catholic Church in Russia; Archbishop Jan Cieplak, Monsignor Konstanty Budkiewicz, and Exarch Leonid Feodorov. Exarch Leonid Feodorov, Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky's newly appointed administrator of the Russian Greek Catholic Church, had already participated in discussions with Orthodox clergy, including Patriarch Tikhon of Moscow and Metropolitan Benjamin of Petrograd. At the time, Patriarch Tikhon was faced with the ongoing Soviet-backed Living Church Schism and was determined defend the hard-won independence of the Moscow Patriarchate from again being lost to control by the State. For this reason, Patriarch Tikhon was both meeting regularly to discuss with both the Exarch and with Father Vladimir Abrikosov the possible transformation of the Russian Orthodox Church into one of the Eastern Catholic Churches. The Patriarch had also been urging those Orthodox clergy and laity who remained loyal to him to similarly meet with the Russian Catholics in order to discuss the possible reunion of the Russian Orthodox Church with the Holy See under the terms laid down at the Council of Florence in 1439.Fr. Paul Mailleux, S.J. (2017), Blessed Leonid Feodorov: First Exarch of the Russian Catholic Church; Bridgebuilder between Rome and Moscow, Loreto Publications. Pages 155-187.
This was why, when Fr. Walsh and the first Exarch of the Russian Greek Catholic Church first met one another and conversed in Ecclesiastical Latin, Feodorov, who admired Patriarch Tikhon and his followers and felt only contempt for the so-called Living Church, urged that the Famine Relief food supplies be entrusted not only to Catholic clergy, but also to those Russian Orthodox priests who remained loyal to Patriarch Tikhon for distribution to the starving. Fr. Walsh enthusiastically agreed with the Exarch's idea and ensured that it was carried out. In Orenburg alone, Fr. Louis Gallagher hosted six local Russian Orthodox bishops to his table to organize the delivery of food supplies to the starving.Fr. Paul Mailleux, S.J. (2017), Blessed Leonid Feodorov: First Exarch of the Russian Catholic Church; Bridgebuilder between Rome and Moscow, Loreto Publications. Pages 150-153.
According to historian Paul Gabel, "By early October the mission was at work. By its own accounts it established hundreds of food kitchens in the Crimea and many more reaching as far north as Moscow and Petrograd. Eventually it gave daily food rations to over 160,000 people in over 400 localities and employed 2,500 Russians as workers at the stations. At its peak in the summer of 1923, it had created clothing and boot-making factories, donated money to sanitaria for children with tuberculosis, and imported medical supplies to combat typhus and malaria, ultimately spending the equivalent of $1.5 million on all programs. This effort can, of course, be construed as magnanimity or opportunism - the latter interpretation favored by many Orthodox Hierarchs and clergy."Paul Gabel (2005), And Created Lenin: Marxism vs. Religion in Russia, 1917-1929, Prometheus Books. Page 382.
Meanwhile, Fr. Walsh and Archbishop Jan Cieplak also succeeded in securing the surrender of the Relics of St. Andrew Bobola, which had been confiscated from their shrine at Polotsk and placed in an anti-religious museum by the Soviet Government. The relics were then transported to the Church of the Gesù in Rome by Walsh's childhood friend and assistant director, Louis J. Gallagher, who later published biographies of both Walsh and St. Andrew Bobola.The biographic note about Louis J. Gallagher in the back of: China in the Sixteenth Century: The Journals of Matteo Ricci (1942; reprint 1953) – an English translation, by Gallagher, of Matteo Ricci and Nicolas Trigault's De Christiana expeditione apud Sinas suscepta ab Societate Jesu