J. Havens Richards

Joseph Havens Richards

Richards became the

Upon the end of his term in 1898, Richards engaged in pastoral work attached to Jesuit educational institutions throughout the northeastern United States. He became the president of Regis High School and the Loyola School in New York City in 1915, and he was then made superior of the Jesuit retreat center on Manresa Island in Connecticut. Richards died at the College of the Holy Cross in 1923.

Early life

Richards was born on November 8, 1851, in Columbus, Ohio.^[1] His parents were Henry Livingston Richards^[a] and Cynthia Cowles, who married on May 1, 1842, in Worthington, Ohio. Havens Cowles was the youngest of eight children, three of whom died in infancy. His surviving siblings were: Laura Isabella (b. 1843), Henry Livingston, Jr. (b. 1846), and William Douglas (b. 1848).^[3]

Henry Livingston Richards was an

Richards was born into a prominent family that traced its lineage to colonial America on both his paternal and maternal sides.^[7] His uncle was Orestes Brownson, a Catholic activist and intellectual.^[8] On his mother's side, he was a descendant of James Kilbourne, a colonel in the U.S. Army who led a regiment on the American frontier in the War of 1812, founded the city of Worthington, Ohio, and became a United States Representative from Ohio.^[9]

On his father's side, Richards's lineage included combatants in the American Revolutionary War, such as William Richards (his great-grandfather), who led a contingent of troops that took part in the siege at the Battle of Fort Slongo^[10] and who later fought in the Battle of Bunker Hill as a colonel. Through William Richards, he traced his ancestry to James Richards, who was documented in 1634 as residing on the Eel River in Plymouth, Massachusetts.^[2]

Education

Richards's father sought to send all his children to Catholic schools but was at times unable to.^[11] Therefore, Richards attended both Catholic and public schools in Jersey City.^[2] At the age of fourteen, he quit school and took up work as a bookkeeper for his father. Four years later, the two of them moved to Boston, Massachusetts, where they worked in the steel industry.^[5]

In September 1869, Richards enrolled at

At the end of his probationary period, Richards was sent to Woodstock College in 1874, where he studied philosophy for four years.^[5] He then went to Georgetown University as a professor of physics and mathematics,^[12] doing work in chemistry during his vacations.^[5] In the summers of 1879 and 1880, he was sent by the Jesuit provincial superior to study at Harvard University.^[13] In July 1883, he returned to Woodstock for four years of theological studies. The provincial superior made an exception for Richards to be ordained after only two years because his father was ill.^[12] Therefore, on August 29, 1885, he was ordained a priest by James Gibbons, the Archbishop of Baltimore, in the college's chapel.^[5] He completed his theological studies in 1887 and returned to Frederick to complete his tertianship.^[12]

Georgetown University

Immediately after the completion of his

Graduate courses in the arts and sciences were re-established in 1889, and courses in theology and philosophy returned to the university, which had previously been moved to Boston and then to Woodstock College.^[19] Richards criticized the decision to relocate the theological training of Jesuits from Georgetown to the "semi-wilderness" of Woodstock, which was "remote from libraries, from contact with the learned world, and from all the stimulating influences which affect intellectual life".^[21]

Richards expanded the

Richards's most immediate task upon taking office was the completion of

In 1892 Richards received a donation from the socialite Elizabeth Wharton Drexel for the construction of Dahlgren Chapel of the Sacred Heart. That year, he also procured the library of historian John Gilmary Shea, which extensively documented the history of the Catholic Church in the United States.^[22] Richards's presidency came to an end on July 3, 1898,^[29] by which time he had experienced worsening health for two years.^[30] He was succeeded by John D. Whitney.^[15]

Anti-Catholicism in the Ivy League

Richards also took up the cause of fighting

Richards sought a retraction from Eliot, writing to him that graduates of reputable Catholic colleges were better prepared to study law than any other college graduates, and he included information on Georgetown's curriculum. Eliot responded by adding Georgetown, the College of the Holy Cross, and Boston College to the list. Upon the provincial superior's instruction, Richards then unsuccessfully lobbied to have all 24 Jesuit colleges in the United States added to the list.^[13]

Pastoral work

Following his retirement from the presidency, Richards became the spiritual father of the novitiate in Frederick.^[30] He remained interested in Georgetown's astronomical observatory, and he petitioned to have a station established in South Africa so that the entire sky could be studied.^[19] The following year, he became the spiritual father of Boston College, where he established the Boston Alumni Sodality. When not in Boston, he spent time in Philadelphia and Brooklyn, where he worked with the New York Sodality. He also began cataloguing Catholic works in the New York Public Library, but his health soon prevented him from continuing. Upon the recommendation that it would benefit his health, Richards moved to the novitiate in Los Gatos, California, in March 1900, but he was there only briefly before visiting his family in Boston after his mother's death.^[32]

Richards returned to Los Gatos in April. In early 1901, he moved back to Frederick, Maryland, where he became minister of the novitiate.

Following his positions in New York, Richards was made superior of Manresa Island in Norwalk, Connecticut, where he received Jesuit scholastics and priests from the Diocese of Hartford during the summer for their retreats. During the rest of the year, he lived on the island with just one other Jesuit. In December 1921, he was transferred to Weston College as spiritual father and procurator, ceasing to hold the latter role in September 1922.^[41]

On March 2, 1923, Richards suffered a stroke, which left his speech impaired and the right side of his body paralyzed. He spent seven weeks in the hospital before going to the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts.^[41] He suffered another stroke on June 8 and died the following day.^[42]

References

Notes

Citations

Sources

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Joseph Havens Richards.

• Works by or about J. Havens Richards at Internet Archive