Francis P. Duffy - Early Life and Career

Early Life and Career

Francis Duffy was born May 2, 1871 in Cobourg, Ontario, Canada, and attended St. Michael's College in Toronto. He immigrated to New York City, where he taught for a time at the College of St. Francis Xavier, and was awarded a master's degree. He became a priest of the Archdiocese of New York, being ordained on September 6, 1896. He attended The Catholic University of America where he earned a doctorate in 1905.

After ordination, Duffy served on the faculty of St. Joseph's Seminary, Dunwoodie, Yonkers, which trains priests for the Archdiocese of New York. He was professor of Philosophical Psychology – a course more related to the Philosophy of the Human Person than to Clinical Psychology, in today's terms – and functioned as a mentor to numerous students. He was also editor of the New York Review, at the time the most scholarly and progressive Catholic theological publication in the United States. Extremely popular with students, Duffy was part of a group faculty members who introduced ground-breaking innovations into the seminary curriculum, putting the institution in the forefront of clerical education.

When authors in the New York Review fell under suspicion of the heresy of modernism, the archbishop of New York, Michael Augustine Corrigan, broke up the faculty and reassigned them to other work. The New York Review itself never published an article that was suspect, but it did print papers by leading Catholic Biblical experts who were part of the newly-emerging schools of Biblical criticism, and several of these authors' other works, which would be uncontroversial today, raised eyebrows in Rome. Duffy himself wrote few signed items in the journal, although he did author parts of it, but was responsible as editor for the entire publication.

Duffy's new assignment was creating the parish of Our Savior Church in the Bronx. There, he organized the parish and built a physical structure that combined parish school and church, one of several innovations he introduced.

During this period, Duffy was active in both the Catholic Summer School, a sort of adult summer camp and continuing education system that foreshadowed the explosion in Catholic higher education for the laity today, and in the military – he was regimental chaplain to the 69th New York, which was federalized for a time during the Spanish-American War.