NC Priest Featured In Maryknoll Exhibit

“The Maryknoll Society’s Causes For Beatification And Canonization,” a new exhibit that follows the path to sainthood of four Maryknoll priests, can be viewed through May 2015 at the Maryknoll Museum of Living Mission at the Maryknoll Mission Center in Ossining.

The exhibit features Maryknoll co-founders Bishop James A. Walsh (Cambridge, Massachusetts) and Father Thomas F. Price (Wilmington, North Carolina), along with Bishop Francis X. Ford (Brooklyn, New York), Maryknoll’s first seminarian who was martyred in China, and Father Vincent R. Capodanno (Staten Island, New York), a U.S. Navy Chaplain killed in action in Vietnam. Click here for the article about Bishop James A. Walsh.

The museum and the Maryknoll Gift Shop at 55 Ryder Road are open Monday-Saturday, 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Admission is free. Click here for directions.

Father Thomas F. Price

Whenever he was lauded as the founder of Maryknoll, Bishop James A. Walsh always credited the indispensable role of prayers from the co-founder, Father Thomas Frederick Price of North Carolina. He often said that nothing could have been accomplished without the prayers of Father Price.

Father Price was born in Wilmington on August 19, 1860. Having converted to the Catholic faith, Price’s parents raised their children to be devout Catholics in the midst of Southern apathy toward the religion.

During his formative years, Father Price was deeply influenced by priests from his Wilmington parish of St. Thomas. With a religious upbringing that included profound understanding of the deep devotion his mother held for the Blessed Virgin Mary, the young Price became attracted to the priesthood.

Ordained as the first priest from North Carolina on June 20, 1886, Father Price was assigned to missionary work in the eastern section of his native state. He established the Nazareth Orphanage and organized summer catechizing teams of seminarians. He opened a missionary training house at Nazareth that served as a preparatory seminary for the education and formation of missioners for home missions.

By carriage, horseback, or foot, Father Price traveled from door to door and farm to farm, facing opposition and sometimes violent anti-Catholic sentiment. But he remained content in spreading the faith one soul at a time.

While Father Price’s prayers, zeal for mission and influence with key members of the Catholic Church in the U.S. contributed significantly to the beginning of the mission society known today as the Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers, he did not live long enough to see the vision develop and prosper. Father Price died from appendicitis on September 12, 1919 in Hong Kong, where he had traveled with the first team of Maryknoll missioners.

Path to Sainthood

The cause for the beatification and canonization for Father Price began on March 9, 2012 in the Diocese of Raleigh. The cause for Father Price originally began at the Diocese of Hong Kong, where the priest died while leading the first Maryknoll missioners. The cause then was transferred to the Archdiocese of New York since Father Price’s grave had been relocated years earlier to the crypt at the Maryknoll Society in New York. As the Archdiocese of New York also is pursuing a cause for Bishop James A. Walsh of Maryknoll, the cause for Father Price was moved to Raleigh with the permission of Rome.

Since Father Price died during 1919, no living witnesses who knew him are available to provide testimony. All testimony is second-hand from people who knew others who had met Father Price. A tribunal has received testimony in North Carolina and New York, and the tribunal may travel to Hong Kong to accommodate possible witnesses living in China.

Once the testimony and documentation have been collected at the diocesan level, the information will be delivered to the Vatican for the second phase of the process. The information again will be examined and further documentation, including any possible testimony of miraculous intervention, will be collected and examined.

Next time: The cause for the beatification and canonization of Bishop Francis X. Ford.