Father Thomas Frederick Price, M.M.

The Tar Heel Apostle

Thomas Frederick Price was born on August 19, 1860, in Wilmington, North Carolina. As an infant, he survived a shipwreck when the vessel carrying his family went down. His mother prayed to the Blessed Virgin Mary for his survival, and that Marian devotion would shape the rest of his life.

In 1881, Price became the first native North Carolinian ordained a Catholic priest. For the next twenty-five years, he served as an itinerant missionary across rural North Carolina, traveling on horseback through a region where Catholics were a tiny minority. He founded Truth magazine to spread the faith and built a network of mission stations throughout the state.

Price’s vision extended beyond the American South. In 1911, together with Father James Anthony Walsh of Boston, he co-founded the Catholic Foreign Mission Society of America, known as Maryknoll. It was the first American Catholic foreign mission society, born from the conviction that the Church in America had matured enough to send its own missionaries abroad.

At age fifty-eight, Price finally went to the missions himself, departing for China in 1918. He served in the Yeungkong region of Guangdong province. Less than a year later, he fell ill and was taken to Hong Kong, where he died on September 12, 1919, after surgery. His cause for canonization was opened by the Diocese of Raleigh on March 9, 2012, with a nihil obstat received from Rome.

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