Norbert McAuliffe

The Man Who Prays

John Francis Joseph McAuliffe was born in lower Manhattan on September 30, 1886, and educated from age nine at St. Agnes, a school run by the Dominican Sisters of Sparkill. He entered the Brothers of the Sacred Heart formation house in Metuchen, New Jersey, in May 1902, took the name Brother Norbert with first vows in 1903, and made perpetual vows in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, in 1910. For nearly three decades he taught in the congregation’s American schools across Indiana, Mississippi, Oklahoma, Louisiana, and New Jersey.

In 1931 he volunteered for the congregation’s first African mission and was named director of the six brothers sent to Uganda, arriving in Gulu on August 29, 1931, to take over St. Louis College, a school the British colonial administration required be staffed by English-speaking teachers.

Apart from a wartime assignment directing the Metuchen house from 1939 to 1945, he spent the rest of his life in Uganda, directing schools and missionary expansion in the north. The Acholi people gave him the name Dano Ma Lego: the man who prays, the man who walks with God.

He died at Alokolum, near Gulu, on July 3, 1959. His cause proceeded through the Archdiocese of Gulu, with the diocesan investigation in 1994 and the title Servant of God in 1995, and Pope Francis declared him Venerable on May 19, 2018. The cause now awaits a validated miracle for beatification.

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