Yesterday was the fifty-fifth anniversary of the death of Father Louis J. Twomey, S.J.—his feast day, if you will—and what a joy it was for me to finish the first full draft of chapter one of my Twomey biography A Priest in Good Trouble. Even with more than nine thousand words and ninety-six footnotes, I still have more footnotes to add to the chapter. But that will have to wait; for now, I intend to stick with the momentum and press on to chapter two.
The first chapter was the hardest. It really will be less difficult from here. There was very little material available on Twomey’s life before he entered the Jesuit novitiate, so I had to do an enormous amount of digging—not only in the Twomey Papers at Loyola New Orleans and the Jesuit Archives & Research Center in St. Louis, but also in the Special Collections at Georgetown University, issues of The Hoya (Georgetown’s student paper), newspaper archives, and numerous other sources.
Here, for paid subscribers, in gratitude for your prayers and all your support, is an excerpt—complete with footnotes! Almost nothing in this excerpt has been published in previous writings on Twomey’s life.
I expect there to be typos in this excerpt, and probably some clumsy grammar too; it is a first draft, after all. Any and all corrections or suggestions you might have would be most welcome and appreciated. Here goes:
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