Early Years
Born into a large Irish Catholic family on a farm in the Margaree Valley of Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, Moses was the eldest boy in a family of twelve. As a youth he was very concerned at the scale of outmigration from the valley: young men and women leaving for the steel mills and coal mines, or taking up jobs as domestics in the “Boston States”. He determined he would get a good education so he could help people make their farms more profitable and give them a reason to stay on the land.
Coady would draw on an unusual combination of gifts, having ‘the soul of a poet’ and ‘the mind of a mathematician’. After graduating top of his class at ‘St. FX’ (St. Francis Xavier University) in Antigonish in 1905, Coady was persuaded by his first cousin Jimmy Tompkins to enter the priesthood. He followed Tompkins to Rome, where he studied theology and philosophy.
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