Administrator, editor; born Ste-Agnès, Quebec, 23 May 1894, son of Thomas Fallon and Catherine Darrah; died Penetanguishene, Ontario, 8 August 1964.A frail, nervous, short man who was weak and sickly from childhood, Joseph Fallon lived an extraordinary life of service in social work and pastoral ministry, especially in the 1930s among the English-speaking Catholic population of Montreal and throughout the postwar years at Martyrs' Shrine, Midland, Ontario.
Fallon was born the youngest son of a large bilingual family of eleven children, all of whom except one of his sisters became priests or religious. After his primary education near Huntingdon, Quebec, he studied at the University of Ottawa and at Collège de St-Boniface, Manitoba, before deciding to enter the Jesuit Order at Guelph, Ontario, 25 August 1914, and begin what would become a very arduous, painful, but unusually active formation. Intestinal and stomach illnesses continued to interrupt his studies. He had to be sent home for three months during his second year as a novice, was forced to interrupt his classical studies for several more months, and spent in the infirmary most of a two-year assignment at Loyola High School, Montreal, 1918-1920.
Poor health did not, however, keep him confined. Quite the contrary. While at Loyola he became involved in the activities of the Catholic Lay Retreat Association, which was based there in the offices of E. J. Devine, SJ, and John Keenan, SJ, and he soon became its general manager. He continued this work during the eight years, 1920-28, that he was assigned to study philosophy and theology at Immaculée-Conception, Montreal, and added to it both the coordinating of monthly Communion breakfasts for some three hundred Catholic lay leaders and the founding of what would become the Xavier Apostolate and its Guild for the financial support of seminarians. In 1923, at the request of Archbishop Georges Gauthier, he also organized a committee to provide aid for the unemployed. He was ordained by the same Archbishop Gauthier at Immaculée-Conception, 14 August 1927.
After a final year of formation in spiritual theology at Abbaye St-Acheul, Amiens, France, Fr. Fallon returned to Montreal in 1929, just as the economic depression was beginning. He continued the promotion of retreats for lay people, this time extending his activities into Ontario and New Brunswick; to Ottawa, Pembroke, Toronto, and to Saint John where in 1930 he planned the first independent retreat house in English-speaking Canada. He also carried on the work he had begun earlier in aid of the unemployed, and promoted the founding, also in 1930, of Montreal's Federation of Catholic Charities, of the Catholic Men's Hostel, and of the St. Martha's Home for destitute women and children, each of which latter institutions also housed an unemployment bureau and a clothing store. All these accomplishments were, in a way, a continuation of Fallon's earlier work. But he became involved in more.
In 1933, the Montreal branch of the Catholic Truth Society and the Catholic weekly The Beacon had become victims of the Depression. Fallon was asked to take charge. He immediately supplied his personal services and the hospitality of his small office in downtown Montreal. Then, helped by a devoted Women's Committee, he set up the Central Catholic Library first in his own office and later, as the library became more successful, in larger premises. It was this library that eventually evolved into the very successful Campion Book Shop. As for The Beacon, he cut expenses, borrowed money from his family and friends, established an independent Board of Directors, recruited teams of volunteer editors and writers, and by 1937 had provided for its survival.
This intense activity and the constant travel to Ottawa and Toronto for the Retreat Association broke down Fallon's already weak health in 1937. A serious collapse, due in part to alcoholism from which he never fully recovered, forced him into a long convalescence. For eight years he served quietly and according to the rhythms of his physical and psychological health, first at St. Ignatius Parish, Winnipeg, 1937-45, and then for another difficult year at St. Andrew's in Thunder Bay, Ontario, 1945-46. Then apparently recovered, he agreed to join the staff at Martyrs' Shrine, Midland, Ontario, as Assistant Director.
For fifteen years, a record tenure as Assistant Director of the Shrine, Fallon became an affectionately familiar figure, moving up and down the hill from the church to the offices and from the offices to the Fort Ste. Marie Inn dozens of times each day with his hesitant, short steps. He was ready and willing to take on any chore, to fulfil any function, even on the shortest notice. Eventually he became the editor of the Martyrs' Shrine Message and wrote many articles for it.
Fallon had a quick mind and a facility for languages, and he could easily grasp the essentials of any situation, great or small. Those who knew him in his Montreal days, as he bargained with factory owners for low-cost clothes or begged food and jobs for the needy, fondly admired his generous determination and practical talent for achieving results with insufficient means. All his life he remained a courageous, kind, meek man, who humbly accepted his personal problems without a trace of complaint.