Edmund Aloysius Walsh (October 10, 1885 – October 31, 1956) was an American Roman Catholic priest of the Society of Jesus and career diplomat from South Boston, Massachusetts. He was also an author, professor of geopolitics and founder of the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service, the first school for international affairs ever founded in the United States. He founded the school in 1919–six years before the U.S. Foreign Service itself even existed–and served as its first regent.
After personally experiencing Soviet anti-religious persecution through his role as the head of the American and Papal humanitarian missions during the Russian famine of 1921, Fr. Walsh became widely known as a public intellectual who both spoke and wrote extensively about intolerant Marxist-Leninist atheism, the Gulag, Soviet war crimes and other human rights abuses, while also arguing as a rhetorician in favor of global religious freedom and the rule of law.
In addition to his role as an investigator of Nazi war crimes and religious persecution while working as an assistant to Robert H. Jackson during the Nuremberg Trials, Walsh played a major role in raising public awareness of human rights abuses under both Far Left and Far Right police states.
So great was his reputation that Fr. Walsh was a confidant of multiple Presidents and other senior members of America's traditionally anti-Catholic White Anglo-Saxon Protestant elite, at a time when both Catholics and Americans of White ethnic ancestry were still being denied social acceptance in the United States.
More than a decade after his death, Fr. Walsh became famous once again, when he was alleged by Roy Cohn to have been the man whose opinion Senator Joseph McCarthy from Wisconsin had first sought before going public with allegations provided by U.S. counterintelligence that the Soviet KGB and the GRU had recruited moles throughout the U.S. Federal Government and propagandists throughout the entertainment industry. Roy Cohn denied knowing, however, anything further about the alleged conversation between Senator MacCarthy and Fr. Walsh, or what advice if any Fr. Walsh had given. Some historians have claimed that Walsh, rather than Senator McCarthy, deserves to be remembered as the greatest American Catholic anti-communist of the 20th-century.
Early life
Walsh was born on October 10, 1885, in Boston, Massachusetts. The youngest of six siblings, his father, John Francis Walsh, was a career police officer in the Boston Police Department, and his mother, Catherine J. (née Noonan) Walsh, emigrated from Ireland to the United States with her family as a young girl. Walsh grew up in South Boston, where one of his childhood friends included his future Jesuit colleague, Louis J. Gallagher.
Walsh first attended a public grammar school, before receiving a scholarship to attend Boston College High School in 1898. After his graduation in 1902, he decided to enter the Society of Jesus, matriculating at the Jesuit novitiate in Frederick, Maryland, on August 14 of that year. When the novitiate relocated from Frederick to St. Andrew-on-Hudson in Poughkeepsie, New York, in January 1903, Walsh moved with it. He professed his first vows there in 1904, and then began three years of philosophical studies at Woodstock College in Maryland.
From 1909 to 1912, during his Jesuit formation, Walsh taught literature at what was then the preparatory division of Georgetown University. He was present at the dedication of the statue of John Carroll on Georgetown's campus in May 1912, and was influenced by Chief Justice Edward Douglas White's speech about the common principles underlying the founding of the United States and Georgetown University. Walsh was awarded a Bachelor of Arts degree from Georgetown.
In September 1912, the Jesuit superiors sent Walsh to Europe for graduate studies. He began to study the classics at University College Dublin, but he was forced to withdraw because the academic senate declined to recognize his bachelor's degree from Georgetown. In March 1913, he began a similar program at the University of London. However, several months later, the Jesuit provincial superior directed Walsh to commence his theological studies, which he began in September of that year at the University of Innsbruck.
In August 1914, with the outbreak of the First World War, Walsh's studies there were interrupted. He instead returned to Woodstock College to continue his theological studies. He was ordained a priest on June 28, 1916, and then spent one year engaged in pastoral work in New York City. Walsh then returned to Woodstock to complete his theological studies, and was awarded a Master of Arts degree.