LOUGHLIN, JAMES F.

Pastor, educator, author; b. Auburn, N.Y., May 8, 1851; d. Barbados, West Indies, March 17, 1911. He attended the Urban College of the Propaganda, Rome, and was ordained on April 4, 1874, attaining a doctorate in theology. After incardination into the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, Pa., he served a brief curacy and was then appointed to teach moral theology and Canon Law at St. Charles Seminary, Overbrook, Pa. He founded (1886) Our Lady of the Rosary parish in Philadelphia, became chancellor (1892), and was made a domestic prelate (1899). In 1901 he became rector of the important parish, Nativity of the Blessed Virgin, Philadelphia, where he concentrated on raising the intellectual level of his parishioners.

He improved parochial and commercial schools and conducted Catholic reading circles, one of which, the Baronius Club, founded in his memory a scholarship at Trinity College, Washington, D.C. Loughlin was one of the founders and a trustee of the Catholic Summer School of America and was its second president; he established the first diocesan cottage at Cliff Haven and frequently lectured on Church history at the school. In the late nineteenth-century school controversy, he opposed Archbishop John Ireland's faribault plan. Loughlin was prominent in the formation of the National Union of Catholic Young Men's Societies, serving as its president as well as being spiritual director of the Archdiocesan Union of Young Men.

He wrote many articles and essays in Church history, of a popular rather than scholarly nature. He was coeditor of the American Catholic Quarterly Review, and for several years he contributed sermons to the Saturday edition of a secular newspaper, the Philadelphia Ledger. His articles for the old Catholic Encyclopedia dealt principally with the lives of medieval popes, local Philadelphia history, and religious sects and included one on the Protestant confessions of faith.

Bibliography: w. lallou, "Monsignor James F. Loughlin,D.D.," Records of the American Catholic Historical Society of Philadelphia 25 (1914): 277–284.

[h. j. nolan]