EDMUND A WALSH Fr. Edmund Walsh, S.J. By Mark Judge (bio) On March 23, 1922, Edmund A. Walsh, a thirty-seven year old American Jesuit priest, arrived in Moscow. Walsh was part of a papal mission sent to Russia to provide relief for a devastating famine that had begun in 1921. What Walsh found was not only mass starvation, but religious persecution - in 1922 twenty-eight Orthodox bishops and over 1,200 priests were murdered. Government processions lampooned religion, as did plays. It was all in keeping with the 1918 Decree on the Separation of Church from State and School from Church. In his diary, Walsh wrote that in the inchoate communist system he say something deadly; he feared “for the consequences of the economic, the political, the social, the religious, educational orders…of [the] entire world.”For the next three decades, until he suffered a stroke in 1952 then died in 1956, Edmund Walsh was one of America�s greatest anti-communists. He was also, as Patrick McNamara explains in his compelling and thoroughly researched book A Catholic Cold War, an intellectual, popular speaker, member of the cocktail party elite in Georgetown, a critic of academic political correctness before the term existed, a believer in a public square informed by the religious values of the people, and advocate for preemptive strikes against potential enemies years before conservatives became neo. He was, in short, a giant - and would no doubt be celebrated as such in the culture were his fight against Nazis and Joe McCarthy rather than Bolsheviks and Stalin.
Posted on: Thu, 08 Aug 2013 11:03:23 +0000
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