NORRIS, JAMES JOSEPH

Lay leader and international expert on relief, refugee, and migration problems; b. Roselle Park, N.J., Aug. 10, 1907; d. Rumson, N.J., Nov. 17, 1976. After graduating from high school in 1924, Norris joined the Missionary Servants of the Most Holy Trinity, where he collaborated closely with the order's founder, Thomas A. Judge. Leaving the order in 1934, he had a brief stint in the business world before the then Rev. Patrick O'Boyle (later the Cardinal Archbishop of Washington, D.C.) appointed him as executive assistant at the Mission of the Immaculate Virgin on Staten Island in 1936. For more than 30 years of his life, Norris was deeply committed to combatting the problems of poverty and injustice. When World War II broke out, Norris was made the assistant director (1941–42), and later executive director (1942–44) of the National Catholic Community Services. He also served with distinction as a commander in the U.S. Navy Armed Guard on active duty from 1944 to 1946.

In 1946 O'Boyle appointed Norris as the European director of War Relief Services for the National Catholic Welfare Conference, the forerunner of the Catholic Relief Services (CRS), helping in the rebuilding of the Church and national communities in Europe in the post-World War II period. From 1959 to his death he served as assistant to the executive director of CRS as that agency of the American bishops turned its energies from a recovered Europe to the third world countries, whose emergence were proving to be among the greatest challenges of the period. Norris also participated in negotiations with Mgsr. Giovanni Battista Montini (the future Paul VI), resulting in the establishment of the International Catholic Migration Commission (ICMC) in 1951. Norris became the president of ICMC (1951–74), and honorary president (1974–76). In its first 25 years of existence, the ICMC assisted more than 200,000 migrants and refugees with loans of $40 million. In both his roles as a key official in the work of CRS and the ICMC, Norris pressed church officials to utilize the strength and stability of the Church to implement Christian principles on an international level as well as to make Catholics themselves more aware of their obligations in justice and charity to the less fortunate throughout the world.

Norris was the only layman invited to address a plenary session of vatican council ii. On Nov. 5, 1964, Norris spoke to the assembled Council Fathers during the debate on the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World. Speaking in Latin, he spoke on the implications and challenges of "World Poverty and the Christian Conscience." One result of the address was the inclusion in the final draft of the Constitution of a proposal to establish a church agency or office which would secure full Catholic participation on social justice and world poverty (see Gaudium et spes, 90). In the ensuing years, Norris collaborated with Joseph gremillion, Luigi ligutti, Barbara ward, Gerald Mahon, and Arthur McCormack to lobby for the implementing of this conciliar provision. As a result of their persistent efforts, Pope Paul VI inaugurated the Pontifical Commission for Justice and Peace, Jan. 6, 1967. National justice and peace commissions were set up subsequently around the world.

A month before his death, Norris was the first American to be awarded by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees the Fridtjof Nanzen Medal, an award to persons who have distinguished themselves in helping solve problems of refugees and migrants on a world scale. Norris was the first layman to be named an official escort on Pope Paul VI's flight to Geneva in June 1966 to visit the International Labor Organization and the World Council of Churches. Pope Paul also named him a member of the Pontifical Commission for Justice and Peace and for the Pontifical Commission "Cor Unum" and designated him as the Vatican's representative at the funeral of Martin Luther King Jr. At the time of his death he was survived by his wife, Amanda, and four sons.

Bibliography: e. egan, Catholic Relief Services: The Beginning Years (Baltimore 1988). r. j. kupke, James J. Norris: An American Catholic Life (Ph.D. diss. Catholic University of America 1995).

[j. c. o'neill/eds.]