An Unordinary Man: A Life of Father John LaFarge, S.J. by Robert A. Hecht

An Unordinary Man: A Life of Father John LaFarge, S.J. By Robert A. Hecht. (Lanham, Maryland:The Scarecrow Press, Inc. 1996. Pp. xii, 287. $67.50.) John LaFarge was the youngest of the seven surviving children of the nineteenth-century American artist John LaFarge (1835-1910) and of Margaret Perry, whose ancestors included Benjamin Franklin and Oliver Hazard Perry, hero of the battle of Lake Erie in the War of 1812. Father LaFarge was born in 1880 in Newport, Rhode Island, and grew up there. Educated in the Newport public schools, he graduated from Harvard College in 1901 and that same year began theological studies at the University of Innsbruck, Austria. Since before ordination to the priesthood he had decided to enter the Society of Jesus, he was ordained, with the approval of the bishop of Providence, on the title of his "patrimony," meaning that he could provide for himself, thus avoiding the obligation of service to the diocese which he would normally have incurred. (Hecht mistakingly says he was ordained on the title of"poverty," which is proper to religious orders.) That was on July 26,1905, and LaFarge entered the Jesuit novitiate of St. Andrew-on-Hudson, Poughkeepsie, New York, on November 13 of that same year. For all this information and much that follows, this book is dependent on LaFarge's autobiography, The Manner Is Ordinary (1954), from which his title also derives. LaFarge went from the novitiate to Canisius College, Buffalo, which had just been transferred from the jurisdiction of the German Jesuit province to the largely Irish-American Maryland-New York province. He stayed for a semester, then transferred to Loyola College, Baltimore.After a happier semester in Baltimore he was sent to Woodstock College to review his philosophical and theological studies, but poor health soon ended any hope of higher studies, and LaFarge began a period of pastoral work that lasted from 1909 to 1926,first in the public institutions on Blackwell's Island in NewYork's East River and then, chiefly among African Americans, in St. Mary's County, Maryland. He became a country pastor, traveling about by horse and buggy and sailing to offshore missions in small boats. Hecht, using archival correspondence, is good at pointing out the evolution of LaFarge's thought. He came with a patrician New Englander's stereotypes and prejudices about African Americans; he came to appreciate their humanity, their virtues, and their failings in a far more sympathetic way. He had known poverty in New York; he found what it meant to have it made harder by racism. LaFarge's educational efforts are chronicled, notably his role in the foundation (1924) of a Catholic black industrial arts school, the Cardinal Gibbons Institute. …