Father Nelson Baker

The Padre of the Poor

Nelson Henry Baker was born on February 16, 1842, in Buffalo, New York. His father, Lewis Baker, was a retired mariner of German Lutheran background; his mother, Caroline Donnellan, was Irish Catholic and raised young Nelson in the faith, having him baptized Catholic in 1851. After graduating high school, he worked in the family store, developing the keen business sense that would later fuel his extraordinary charitable enterprise.

In July 1863, at age twenty one, Baker enlisted in the 74th New York State Militia during the Civil War, serving at the Battle of Gettysburg. After discharge, he built a successful feed and grain business with a fellow veteran. But a growing call to the priesthood led him to enter Our Lady of Angels Seminary in 1869. During a pilgrimage to Paris in 1874, he knelt at the shrine of Notre Dame des Victoires and consecrated his life to Our Lady of Victory, a devotion that would define everything he built.

Ordained on March 19, 1876, Father Baker was assigned in 1882 to the struggling institutions at Limestone Hill in Lackawanna, New York, which were drowning in debt. Applying his business acumen and unfailing trust in Our Lady, he launched the Association of Our Lady of Victory, a national fundraising network that erased all debts and funded a vast expansion. Over the next fifty four years, he built an orphanage, a home for abandoned infants, a maternity hospital, schools, a working boys’ trade school, and the magnificent Our Lady of Victory Basilica.

During the Great Depression, Father Baker fed, clothed, and sheltered the needy regardless of religious faith, earning the title “Padre of the Poor.” He died on July 29, 1936, at the age of ninety four. More than 500,000 people filed past his coffin. His cause for canonization was formally opened in 1987, and in 2011, Pope Benedict XVI declared him Venerable, recognizing his heroic virtue.

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