Bishop James Anthony Walsh, M.M.

Builder of Maryknoll

James Anthony Walsh was born on February 24, 1867, in Boston, Massachusetts. Ordained for the Archdiocese of Boston in 1892, he spent his early priesthood developing a deep passion for the foreign missions. As director of the Society for the Propagation of the Faith in Boston, he traveled widely and saw firsthand that the American Church had no missionary society of its own.

To build awareness, Walsh founded The Field Afar magazine, which brought stories from Catholic missions around the world into American homes. The magazine would later become Maryknoll Magazine, one of the most widely read Catholic publications in the country.

In 1911, Walsh joined forces with Father Thomas Frederick Price, an itinerant missionary from North Carolina, to found the Catholic Foreign Mission Society of America, known as Maryknoll. It was the first American Catholic foreign mission society, and the two priests received approval from the American bishops and from Rome within the same year.

Walsh built the Maryknoll headquarters in Ossining, New York, and oversaw the training and sending of missionaries to China, Korea, Japan, and Latin America. In 1918, the first Maryknoll missionaries departed for China. Father Price was among them, though he would die the following year in Hong Kong.

In 1933, Pope Pius XI named Walsh Titular Bishop of Siene in recognition of his extraordinary contribution to the missionary Church. By the time of his death on April 14, 1936, at Maryknoll, New York, Walsh had built Maryknoll into the largest American Catholic missionary organization, with hundreds of priests, brothers, and sisters serving across the globe.

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