A Long-Neglected Autobiography: Father Finn, S. J.
TOLD BY HIMSELF For His Friends Young and Old
In the past few years, I have come to love the works of Fr. Francis J. Finn, S. J., whose most famous book was Tom Playfair and the trilogy it began. He was a priest, teacher, and writer whose name has been all but forgotten despite the popularity his books held for decades. It was still so popular in the mid-20th century that Dr. Catherine Bilow (the original author of Dr. Catherine Bilow’s List of Children’s Books) recalls being read the series as a girl in grade school by her teacher during free time. Now a veteran teacher for half a century, she continues to read his trilogy to the students in my school.
Despite our cultural amnesia, his literary ministry preached the Gospel to millions. His works consistently guided souls to a deeper devotion to study and prayer, particularly in the Mass, adoration, and the sacraments. Considering the dearth of current fiction that mentions anything about the spiritual life, he is desperately needed for our times. His biography especially is an excellent means for adults, particularly teachers, to examine their roles in developing devotion in young people. For the first time in nearly 100 years, I present to you Fr. Francis J. Finn’s autobiography in both kindle and print formats! (I have added links to this post, and I make a commission on books linked to amazon that are clicked. If you like the book, consider using these links.)
Until now, there were no or, at least, VERY few available copies. If you would like to purchase a copy, you can do so in kindle, paperback, or hardback through Amazon here. In the future, I would like to publish a series of Fr. Finn’s works in nice binding with ribbons, coverart, the works, but that will be a job for another day. In the meantime, Amazon’s publishing will suffice. Alternatively, if you become a paid subscriber for only $2.50 a month with the below year-long 50% discount, I will be releasing a chapter a week on Substack every Wednesday until the entire book is posted. While the preface and first chapter will be available for everyone to read, each following chapter will remain behind a paywall after the first few paragraphs.
It took a lot of work to learn how to prepare this text well instead of the visually offensive printed pdfs so often found. Each page has been retypset and edited thoroughly.
Even if you can’t commit to a new book now or becoming a paid subscriber, I highly encourage everyone interested in the history of Catholic pedagogy to read the preface written by Daniel A. Lord, S.J. below. He was, like so many others, inspired to become a Jesuit in large part because of Fr. Finn’s books, and his account of knowing him in real life is inspiring. Educators out there won’t want to miss this.
Father Finn, S. J. The Story of His Life TOLD BY HIMSELF For His Friends Young and Old
Edited, and with a Preface by DANIEL A. LORD, S.J.
NEW YORK, CINCINNATI, CHICAGO, SAN FRANCISCO
BENZIGER BROTHERS PRINTERS TO THE HOLY APOSTOLIC SEE
Imprimi Potest
J. J. O'CALLAGHAN, S.J.
Praepositus Provincialis
Provinciae Chicagiensis, S.J.
Nihil Obstat
ARTHUR J. SCANLAN, S.T.D.
Censor Librorum
Imprimatur
+PATRICK CARDINAL HAYES
Archbishop of New York
New York, September 10, 1929
FATHER FINN, S.J. COPYRIGHT, 1929 BY BENZIGER BROTHERS. PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
CONTENTS
Preface
I. The Beginning of All
II. The Troubled Sea of Learning
III. Happy Days as a Novice
IV. Five Months' Banishment
V. My Second Entrance
VI. First Experiences in the Classroom
VII. The Rocky Road
VIII. Pioneer Work
IX. The Small Yard
X. My First Year of Philosophy
XI. Back to St. Mary's
XII. "Tom Playfair" Appears
XIII. My Companions at Woodstock
XIV. Two Years in Milwaukee
XV. The Publishers Meet My Heroes
XVI. I Am Ordained
XVII. Varied Employments
XVIII. Leisure to Write
XIX. Thoughts on Authorship
XX. The Little Flower Library
XXI. New Work in Cincinnati
XXII. The Free Parish School
XXIII. The Commercial Department
PREFACE
FRIENDS of Father Finn (and surely every Catholic who ever read one of his books is a loyal and grateful friend of his) will always regret that death cut short his eagerly awaited memoirs. Undoubtedly, had he lived, other chapters would have been added to the book-precious chapters on his associates, the army of friends who filled his life, the children whose careers he helped to shape his beautifully optimistic philosophy of life. A rough outline of some of these chapters was found among his papers. But it was almost with his dying breath that he dictated the last chapter of the memoirs as they now stand; and God wrote the "Finis" which was to terminate the last written work of His devoted author.
In editing the memoirs, Miss Florence Moran, Father Finn's faithful secretary, and I have kept in all cases Father Finn's own words. The memoirs stand essentially as Father Finn wrote them. The intrusion of an editor into the book would be an impertinence. So in these memoirs the reader will find Father Finn speaking to him of his early years, of St. Louis University in the days when it was hardly more than a small high school, of old St. Mary's emerging from its period as an Indian school, of remote origins and the final creation of his famous fictional characters, of his varied life as a Jesuit, of his labors in the classroom and the parish, of his splendid quarter-century at St. Xavier's, Cincinnati.
When I say that he speaks to his reader, I mean just that. Father Finn did not, in the strict sense, write his memoirs. He spoke them aloud to his friends. They were the memories of a full and rich life which he had again and again rehearsed to attentive listeners, and which now he spoke to the thousands of unseen friends whom he could not meet, but for whom he felt a deep personal attachment. He talked his memoirs, and the swift pencil of Miss Moran or one of her assistants caught the spoken word and imprisoned it for the interested reader. This fact is enough to explain the easy, familiar, conversational tone which one finds throughout the book.
The sixty-odd years covered by the memoirs were years of staggering world transition. We are farther away, someone has declared, from the eighties and nineties of the last century than we are from the Renaissance or even the thirteenth century. Actually, as one reads these memoirs, the St. Louis University and St. Mary's College of Father Finn's early days seem to belong to another period of history. One can hardly associate these pioneering schools with the huge, modern, educational institutions which have grown out of them.
That in itself brings clearly to our minds the fact that Father Finn was still of the race of pioneers. When he calls those early days at St. Mary's pioneer days, he selects precisely the right word.
Undoubtedly we can be grateful that he lived in pioneer days. Out of the brave pioneering which was not far removed from the pioneering of the early Jesuits who came to Missouri because the Indians still needed first lessons in civilization, was born in Father Finn a spirit which to the end continued to be the courageous spirit of a pioneer. He pioneered in Catholic literature at a time when Catholic literature in the United States was at a dismally low ebb. He pioneered in Catholic education and built his school on an ideal. Other Jesuits have been proud of the fact that they could walk in his pioneering footsteps. No one will ever know how many young Jesuits, for instance, have been fired to high enterprise and noble achievement by the example of his brave experimenting and adventuring.
Throughout the memoirs one comes upon hint after hint of Father Finn's self-depreciating modesty. In the midst of the chorus of modern self advertisement this note sounds almost out of tune. There is, however, to anyone who knew Father Finn, nothing forced or false about it. Father Finn seemed not to have an ounce of conceit in his make-up. Perhaps that sadly broken course of studies and the incessant recurrence of illness and pain were given him by God as safeguards for his humility. He seemed to feel that, because his studies had often been sketchy and always hampered by ill health, he was badly equipped for his work. He seemed to regard himself as a broken instrument used by God to show that in His might He did not need the perfect, polished tool.
It never seemed to occur to Father Finn that his triumph over his physical hardships, the fact that he was so sound a scholar in spite of his most discouraging course of studies, was the clearest sign of his great natural gifts. Almost without the opportunities or health of an ordinary Jesuit, he wrote a small library and carved for himself lasting monuments.
Perhaps he has unconsciously given us the secret of his successful life in one simple passage of the memoirs: "From the earliest days of my novice ship to the present I have always thought that if we cast our cares upon the Lord He will not fail us."
The thing which makes that passage noteworthy is that Father Finn lived absolutely in accord with what he believed to be the perfect rule of life. The result seems to have been that the Lord lifted this delicate young man, with his broken and disorganized training as a Jesuit, to heights of distinguished achievement. Like his father St. Ignatius, whom Francis Thompson refers to as one of the world's famous dyspeptics, Father Finn, by his implicit trust in the grace of God, rose above physical disabilities. He was another of the world's great sick men.
One needs to know Father Finn well and love him deeply to get a proper estimate of his comments about his character and its disagreeable angles. But even the chance acquaintance will, when he reads the passages in which Father Finn speaks of himself as an unpleasant young Jesuit, be moved to honest incredulity. No doubt Father Finn sincerely believed the words he wrote; no one else ever will. Father Finn, the gracious, kindly, lovable person, who never, even in the last period of long and tiresome illness, showed anything but a smiling, gentle, courteous face to the world; Father Finn, the friend of all mankind; Father Finn, to whom children ran instinctively! Unpleasant? The whole idea is quite absurd.
But his friends will, in reading those passages, think of parallel instances among the saints. Father Finn, in his humility, says there were times when he was a very unpleasant person; the saints have been known to call themselves the greatest of sinners. In both cases sincerity is obvious. But in both cases the discriminating reader will remember that, though the statements represent honest conviction, they are none the less flatly wrong. Only the deepest and most genuine humility could have kept Father Finn from knowing that he walked through life surrounded by the love and admiration of thousands. And love and admiration do not follow even temporary unpleasantness of character.
Many chapters, as I have already stated, could have been added to Father Finn's memoirs. That chapter on his friends just cries to be written. Few men have been as rich in friendships as he. The boys of old St. Mary's followed him through life. The girls of St. Xavier's dogged his footsteps. Distinguished professional men and newsboys, city bosses and the policeman on the beat, actors and negro crossing-sweepers, little girls and society women, were his personal friends. He made a brief trip to Hollywood and famous motion-picture stars took him into their confidence. Jackie Coogan gave him, probably without knowing it, the material for a book. "Big Boy," passing through Cincinnati, was brought to see him.
He sat in the club president's box at the Cincinnati ball park and knew every man on the Reds. Jim Tully, ex-tramp and writer, out of his lurid past remembered the kindness of a priest at St. Xavier's who put into his hands, reddened from his task as dishwasher, a copy of Tennyson. The priest, of course, was Father Finn.
Fellow Jesuits, young and old, held him in truest affection. Perfect strangers sought out his office on the certain assumption that he would have time for their problems and difficulties. I have heard it said that he was the best-known man in Cincinnati-and Cincinnati is a city of notables. Certainly toward the close of his life he was carried along on a wave of friendship. Men and women positively struggled to make life happy and comfortable for him. He had spent his life generously for others, and in so doing he had found the secret of winning and keeping friends.
I shall never forget the first time I walked with him down the streets of Cincinnati. It was a new and startling experience. Here was one man in the world for whom money seemed unnecessary. I had just got off a late train, so we dropped in for lunch at the city's best-known restaurant. We ordered, ate; the proprietor came up, spoke to Father Finn, and wrote his own initials on our check. We took a taxi, and the driver did not pull his meter flag. We approached a motion-picture theater; the manager ran up, greeted Father Finn effusively in an unmistakably Jewish accent, and begged him to come in and pass on the new film that was being presented. We taxied, at the expense of the taxi company, to the ball park, sat in the box immediately back of the catcher, and were welcomed with a smile. People stopped him on the street to press money into his hands, money not for himself but for his multiplied charities. All told, it was something new in my life, a day that proved to be a long tribute to Father Finn of everybody's friendship.
Yet, I was later told by his intimates, this was not an exceptional day. Father Finn had, hardly knowing it himself, reached a point in the friendship and affection of people, non-Catholic as well as Catholic, where they thought it an honor and a privilege to do for him whatever lay in their power. In the light of all this we smile as we read his comments about his unpleasantness of character. Humility is not always strict truth.
Were I to try to analyze Father Finn's gift for friendship, I should reduce it, quite aside from his notoriously open-handed charity, to two outstanding qualities: He never said an unpleasant thing about anybody, and he invariably found something in the least attractive person which he could, and did, praise.
I seriously doubt if any of his acquaintances can give an instance in which Father Finn spoke ill of anyone. Men might do him grievous wrong. He waved his hands expressively and with that gesture seemed to wipe out the memory of the ill done him. An occasional false friend played him a low trick. If you brought up the matter and said in bitter terms what you thought of that erstwhile friend, Father Finn's severest comment would be, "Strange chap…odd fellow…One never knows why people do unusual things." In fact I myself have heard him make excuses for quite atrocious wrongs and seen him treat with forgiving courtesy men who had deeply hurt him.
Possibly, like many other busy men, he was too occupied with big things to have time to be bothered with petty ones. Certainly, like a sincerely holy man, he did not consider wrongs that were done to him personally as really of any great importance.
If there was anything good to be said of any one, Father Finn invariably said it. His speech dripped kindness. When he talked of his fellow Jesuits, for instance, the expressions of friendship and regard which you will find running all through these memoirs were constantly on his lips. "Fine fellow…extraordinarily brilliant…very charitable…I like his stuff…How does he do so much work? . . . Clever writer…wonderful companion."
With a hospitality rare enough in writers, he loved to welcome new authors especially when they invaded his own field of juvenile fiction. Many an author seems to resent as a personal affront the success of another author in some line of work that has been considered up to that moment particularly his own. Father Finn, on the contrary, anxiously scanned the horizon for any new writer, even when he sailed out for the first time in a ship that had taken its lines clearly from Father Finn's pioneering craft. Probably there is not a Catholic author in America or England who has not, somewhere among his cherished possessions, a letter or a clipping from the pen of Father Finn praising his work.
One would think that after his long experience with the realities of life (for he had met his share of them; how could he escape them, living as he did shoulder to shoulder with the poverty of a big city?) he would have lost some of his faith in mankind. Not he. He went through life smiling trustfully at everyone he met, and because of that trust people consistently showed him their better side. His friends and even his casual acquaintances somehow tried to live up to his high opinion of them. So it happened that till the day he died he trusted men and women and admired the humble virtues of commonplace humanity with a deeper appreciation than he did when, as an inexperienced, bookish youth, he faced the first little class of disillusioning "roughnecks" at old St. Mary's.
No wonder that, quite without realizing it, he built up about him a staff of devoted, faithful, loyal fellow-workers, men and women, any one of whom would have given life's blood to spare him pain or annoyance. Between him and the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune were the bodies and souls of friends actually shielding him from suffering. And the writers whose books he praised so generously felt the deepest personal affection for him even though they might not know him in the flesh.
The unwritten chapter on his friends would not be complete without a whole section on the boys and girls who filled his life. He refers to them briefly but feelingly in the pages of the memoirs. But we get hardly a glimpse of the boys and girls who were so much a part of the years in Cincinnati.
Wherever he went, he was surrounded by them. His daily walk to and from the school and rectory was a continued triumphal procession. Children fought for the privilege of holding his hands and carrying his bundles. Children hung about outside his office for the moment when he would come out and in passing, pat them on the head. During those last years, whenever he rode in a borrowed automobile to get the afternoon fresh air, he filled the car with the little boys and girls of his beloved school, boys and girls who positively puffed with pride as they rode out in someone's glamorous limousine at the side of their Father Finn.
For him these children produced their entertainments, sang songs, danced Irish dances, played with inexperienced hands on squeaky violins, rehearsed their elaborate plays, and produced their famous musical comedies. They rushed into his office during recess period, and, though he was a sick and weary man, I never once saw him so tired that he had no smile for them.
He often chose as his office boy some unmanageable youngster in the grades, and the honor of being Father Finn's office boy brought about an almost miraculous reformation. He dictated his letters patiently to the little, inexperienced stenographers from the commercial department, and when they had gained speed under his eyes, he sent them out into the business world with his recommendation.
Every Monday night the parish hall of St. Xavier's was jammed with the youngsters of the neighborhood, who shouted and laughed and wept and screamed with excitement over the motion pictures supplied to him by the booking offices of the city. And when each year the day of the St. Xavier Picnic dawned, young Cincinnati swarmed out to Coney Island, filled every deck and rail of the excursion steamers, and in the joy of the city's biggest picnic, swirled about Father Finn, the youngest and happiest picnicker of the lot.
Throughout the world the friends of Father Finn numbered the young Catholic population of every nation. When it was my privilege to present him to the fourteen hundred student delegates of our first National Sociality Convention in St. Louis, they greeted him as a friend and cheered him to the echo. When he made a trip to Florida in search of health, youngsters were awaiting him at almost every station along the line. And sick though he was, he struggled from the Pullman to see the little friends who wanted to shake the hand that had sketched for them their favorite heroes.
There is something almost prophetic about the last lines he dictated for the "St. Xavier Calendar." He was thinking about the boys and girls who had filled those later years as he wrote:
"I could put down some wonderful stories con nected with this department [the Commercial De partment], but the heroes and heroines of these stories happen to be very much younger than I. Possibly they would not like to be shown up in print, and might in consequence refuse to attend my funeral. I would not like that at all."
With strange significance, this lover of children, in the very last lines he ever wrote, is concerned with a fear that the boys and girls who had crowded the happy days at St. Xavier's might not be present at his funeral. They were there, believe me, by the thousand, crying silently for their dead friend.
Another chapter, of course, could have been written about his "Calendar." Even in the years when his pen was supposed to be resting, he was finding an outlet for the urge to write (an urge that though stifled will still have its way) in the pages of St. Xavier's Church Calendar.
You surely know the drab and level monotony of most church calendars–announcements, clipped articles, stale jokes, flat records of trivial parish events, ancient squibs by those two famous authors "Exchange" and "Anon." If you do, you will realize the real compliment I pay Father Finn's "Calendar" when I say that its monthly appearance was eagerly awaited by a large audience inside and outside of the parish.
In it the reader found true and pungent literary comment, references to books so new that few had yet heard of them, or a gay shout over some author just discovered. Pithy editorials summed up some current question in a way that settled it forever. In later years Father Finn's intelligent and constructive comments on the motion pictures, though they appeared in this supposedly obscure little monthly, were yet important enough to catch the attention and command the respectful reading of motion picture producers and czars in New York and Hollywood.
Inevitably "America," the Jesuit national review of the week, made a valiant effort to secure him for its staff, a move that was blocked by the united protests of the people of St. Xavier's. But when the editors of "America" sought to enlist the pen of Father Finn, they were thinking, not of his juvenile books, but of the comment on current events and the literary criticism that had lifted a church calendar out of the dull slough of parish bulletins and made it sparklingly interesting even to those who had never seen or never expected to see St. Xavier's, Cincinnati.
Another chapter, almost necessarily, would be written about Father Finn's varied interests. The old "Nothing human is foreign to me" was certainly true of him. As one reads the memoirs one notices how, without real effort, he swung from a life devoted to boys to a life the capital interest of which was a Young Ladies' Sodality and a grammar school. That was typical of his remarkable adaptability and breadth of interest.
Sit him down to talk literature, and he glowed. But take him out roughing it on a picnic (as we young scholastics used to do when, prior to his plunge into a new novel, he was resting at Prairie du Chien) and he sat under a tree, eating burned steak, or swam out into the treacherous Wisconsin, or lay on his back smoking and looking at the clouds, a boon companion.
His keen love of sports never flagged, and with equal understanding and appreciation he watched the preparations for a Gilbert and Sullivan opera or for one of Victor Herbert's musical comedies. He talked current events like a city editor, and Dickens as if "Pickwick" had been written yesterday. He loved a good joke and told a story well, and he was a stimulating listener.
He never developed, even to the last, that ancient and tiresome attitude of living in the past, praising the old days and raising horrified eyebrows at the new. On the contrary he kept abreast not merely of events but of popular feelings and movements. He could discuss the latest motion picture with the children, or the latest distinguished. novel with a professor, or some new spiritual book with a nun, or a freshly issued magazine with some college man. He even seemed to understand modern young people and like them. He frequently said, and meant it, that the Catholic young people of the present are constantly improving in initiative, reliability, spiritual interest, manliness, womanliness, all-round Catholic leadership. He had the astonishing ability to get the viewpoint of a college boy and, quite as easily, the viewpoint of a flapper stenographer lately a graduate of his school.
Because of this, young people paid him the compliment of never thinking him old. Even the critical boy and girl of sixteen to twenty-one (to which age anybody over forty is just a little ridiculous) felt that he sympathized with them. Probably the last speech he made in public, his address to the student Sodalists in St. Louis, was a speech in praise of Catholic young people. Father Finn was as young as the day in which he lived and as up to the minute as his own desk calendar.
Now all this preface, if you have followed me thus far, is, merely, I must confess, keeping you from reaching Father Finn's own story. Perhaps I have written a much longer preface than he would have cared to see added to his book.
But if I write at length, it is because I feel that I owe him more than a common debt of gratitude. Like most Catholic boys, of course, my young mind was early filled with the high romances of his boy heroes. In their company I first met the Jesuits whom later, to my great good fortune, I was to JOin. From these boys of fiction, I learned much of honor and courage and cleanness of mind and body. I came to believe in the manliness of piety. In their company I spent happy hours and never did I leave them without the implicit resolve to live as they lived and do as they did.
This I shared in common with thousands of other Catholic youngsters in every country. My great debt, however, lies in the fact, that during my sophomore year at college Father Finn came to give our retreat. Later on I had the happiness of telling him that it was the one retreat that ever really mattered to me. I sat through his talks listening as I had never listened before. I made to Father Finn the most important confession of my life, and from the close of that retreat my eyes were set toward the goal of life in the Society of Jesus.
So Father Finn was far more to me than the genial and sympathetic friend who so tactfully disregarded the difference in our ages. He was more than the pleasant companion of picnics and chats and boat trips, more, even, than the kindly critic who watched my first literary strivings and gave me encouragement during days when I thought the going pretty rough and hopeless. He was the wise and skillful retreat master who first set my feet as a young college boy on a straight and sure path toward a happy life.
For the friendship that has lasted during much of my Jesuit life, for encouragement in everything that I have ever attempted, for the inspiration of his own life, I am deeply grateful. But for what that retreat back in 1907 did for me-for that I cannot say an adequate word of gratitude. He knows now, though I only partially succeeded in telling him while he lived, how much that coming of his to Chicago when I was a vague and callow collegian meant to me.
And now, with a gesture, I step aside. Father Finn would speak to you. But as I step aside, I can almost fancy the thousands of his friends crowding round to listen to the rich and colorful experiences of his sixty and more years. Friends, here is Father Francis J. Finn of the Society of Jesus and of the civilized world.
DANIEL A. LORD, S. J.
A complete list of Father Finn's books will be found in the Bibliography.
St. Mary’s…is that by any chance referring to the wonderful traditional Catholic school and college in Kansas by that name? I know the SSPX obtained it from the Jesuits and that it had been an Indian mission before then…