FR. JOSEPH L. CLARKE, S.J.

Pastor; born Montreal 16 April 1907, son of Hugh Joseph Clarke and Mary O'Connor; died St. Catharines, Ontario, 8 January 1977.

Joseph Lawrence Clarke came from a large family, six of whom became religious. He completed his high school studies at Callicoon, N.Y., and entered St. Stanislaus Novitiate in Guelph 7 September 1925. After his studies in classics there and in philosophy at the seminary in Toronto, he was assigned to Montreal in 1933. There he taught English and French at Collège Brébeuf and Loyola High School, 1933-36. He studied theology at Immaculée-Conception where he was ordained, 13 August 1939, and spent the year 1940-41 at Mont-Laurier, Quebec, completing studies in spiritual theology. He resumed teaching French at Loyola High School in 1941-43.

Fr. Clarke found studies and teaching difficult. In 1943 he moved to the parish at Loyola where he was very successful as Moderator of the Catholic Laymen's Retreat Association, and in 1946 to St. Stanislaus Novitiate, where he took a leading part in the "Mission Band" of preachers dedicated to renewing devotion in the parishes by their sermons on the meditations in the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius. For twenty-two years he travelled from a base of operations in Jesuit residences in Guelph, Pickering, and Toronto, to parishes across Canada and the United States. He was short of stature, but his rich and commanding voice, his ready wit and powers of mimicry as well as a charming simplicity and deep compassion caused him to be admired, loved and remembered by all those who heard or knew him.

In 1968 he retired from the Mission Band to become Port Chaplain in Toronto as well as chaplain to the Princess Margaret and Wellesley Hospitals. After his health failed in 1973, he retired to the Jesuit Infirmary at St. Catharines, where he died of heart failure.