Father Louis Twomey, S.J. (1905-1969)

Born in Florida, Louis Twomey graduated from Jesuit High School in 1923. In 1926 he turned down a baseball contract with the Washington Senators to enter the Jesuits’ New Orleans Province. Ordained in 1939, he taught for three decades at Loyola University in New Orleans. While he was there, he founded the Institute of Industrial Relations, an organization dedicated to improving labor-management relations. Through the institute he also promoted vocational training, community development and race relations. In 1948, he started publishing a newsletter Christ’s Blueprint for the South, a means of applying Catholic social teaching locally. A champion of organized labor, Twomey said: “There is no such thing as limited freedom… The requirements of justice demand that the wage and other conditions of work be such as to accord with the intrinsic dignity of the human personality.” After his death, novelist Walker Percy said of him: “He was a good man to have around and there were too few like him. As much as anyone he pricked and awakened the conscience of the South.”