William Laurence Sullivan

William Laurence Sullivan (November 15, 1872 – October 5, 1935) was an American Unitarian clergyman, prolific author and literary critic, whose Letters to His Holiness, Pope Pius X, was the last work by a U.S. author to have been placed on Vatican's list of prohibited books (Index Librorum Prohibitorum).

Early life and education

A native of East Braintree, Massachusetts, Sullivan was born only a year after his parents, Patrick and Joanna (Desmon) Sullivan, had emigrated from the Irish town of Bandon in County Cork. The family subsequently moved to Quincy, Massachusetts. His father died when William was fourteen. He chose the confirmation name "Laurence" in honor of Lawrence of Rome, deacon and martyr. Intent on becoming a priest, he studied, between 1892 and 1896, at Boston College and St. John's Seminary in the Brighton section of Boston, where he took the degree of Ph.B.

Career Catholic priest He joined the Paulist community at Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. and received degrees of S.T.B. and S.T.L. He was ordained a priest in 1899. From 1899 to 1901 Sullivan served as a Paulist mission-preacher in Tennessee but returned to Washington due to poor health. He was assigned to parish work, teaching and writing for the Catholic Word. For several years he was Professor of Sacred Scripture and Theology at St. Thomas's College. Also in 1917 he was the Dudleian lecturer at Harvard.

At the close of his service in New York, he spent the following two years, 1922–24, preaching in 23 missions across the U.S. and Canada. During the 1920s, he led and participated in numerous theological discussions, disagreements and controversies regarding theism and the encroachment of humanism, which he opposed. From 1924 to 1928 he served as pastor in Missouri at St. Louis' Church of the Messiah, taught at Meadville Theological School and traveled as a lecturer.

William Laurence Sullivan married Frances Estelle Throckmorton in 1913, the daughter of Hugh William Throckmorton and Rebecca Ellen Upton, and the granddaughter of U.S. Representative Charles Horace Upton (R-VA), all of Washington, DC. The marriage lasted twenty-two years, until his death, in Germantown, Pennsylvania, six weeks prior to his 63rd birthday. In 1929 he had accepted the Germantown ministry, his final one, where, after six years as a pastor, he was memorialized as "...towering in his ability to lift and to lead, yet warmly near in his tender concern for the smallest human suffering; a man oppressed by the problems of this world's evil, but radiant in his faith in a Kingdom yet to be".