Louis J. Gallagher

Louis J. Gallagher, SJ (July 22, 1885 – August 14, 1972) was an American Jesuit, known for his educational and literary work.

Biography Born in Boston on July 22, 1885, Louis J. Gallagher entered the Society of Jesus on August 15, 1905, was ordained as a priest in 1920, and worked as the headmaster of Xavier High School in New York City (1921–22).

In the aftermath of the Russian famine of 1921, Gallagher went to Russia as the Assistant Director of Papal Relief Mission, which was headed by Edmund A. Walsh (1922–23), also an American Jesuit and Gallagher's close friend. Besides providing help to the starving of the Volga, the two Jesuits had a special task, given to them by Pope Pius XI as one of the first things he did as the Pope: to "seek and find" the Holy Relics of their 17th-century colleague, Blessed Andrew Bobola, which had apparently disappeared from Polotsk during or soon after the Russian Civil War or the Soviet-Polish War. In September 1923 the Bolsheviks told the American Jesuits that Bobola's relics had been taken to a medical museum ("Hygiene Exhibition" of the People's Commissariat for Health in Moscow) and allowed them to be taken to the Vatican.

Back in the US, Gallagher served as the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Georgetown University (1924–26), Assistant to Provincial of the New England Province of the Society of Jesus (1926–32),

In April 1938, the same Pius XI who had started his pontificate charging the two Jesuits in Moscow with the task of searching for Bobola's relics, had Bobola canonized, less than a year before his own death.

Gallagher also was one of the founders of the Institute of Social Order (1941–43), and served as the archivist of the New England Province of the Society of Jesus,

Gallagher died in a Massachusetts hospital on August 14, 1972

Literary work Louis J. Gallagher wrote, or translated into English from Latin and Italian, a number of books, usually connected with the history of the Jesuit Order.

The Test Heritage (1938) The life of Saint Andrew Bobola of the Society of Jesus, martyr, by Cesare Moreschini; translated by Louis J. Gallagher and Paul Vincent Donovan. B. Humphries, inc. (Boston), 1939. The China That Was (1942) China in the Sixteenth Century: The Journals of Matteo Ricci (1942; reprint 1953) - an English translation of Matteo Ricci and Nicolas Trigault's De Christiana expeditione apud Sinas suscepta ab Societate Jesu Episode on Beacon Hill (1950) Edmund A. Walsh, S.J., a Biography (1962)

On the screen It was reported in 2009 that the Polish director Robert Gliński was planning to shoot a movie about Walsh's and Gallagher's adventures in Russia, under the title ("Soul Hunter").