Fr. Louis Twomey: Martin Luther King’s Jesuit Ally

By Dawn Eden Goldstein

On February 18, 1957, the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., wrote to Henry J. Engler, Jr., dean of Loyola University New Orleans’s business school. King had risen to prominence leading the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott, a triumph against racial segregation. His face was on the cover of Time magazine, and he had just been elected president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

Yet, as the world awaited his next move, King’s mind was on the past actions of a Jesuit priest.

“Dear Dr. Engler,” King typed, “Please copy from Father’s files some of his statements to the people involved in the last sugar-cane strike.”

By "Father,” King meant Engler’s Loyola colleague Louis J. Twomey, SJ (1905–1969), a labor priest known for his support of Black workers.

King’s note is part of a newly discovered cache of letters revealing that Twomey was his earliest ally in the Catholic clergy.

On this 95th anniversary of King’s birth, these letters shed new light on his ecumenism. They also show how King supported Twomey’s own advocacy. Twomey, a co-drafter of Jesuit Father General Pedro Arrupe’s 1967 Letter on the Interracial Apostolate, played a crucial role in motivating US Jesuits to promote civil rights.

Twomey grew up in Florida without questioning his privileged status as a white man in the segregated South. But as a young Jesuit in the 1930s, he discovered the social teachings of Leo XIII and Pius XI, as well as the work of interracialist John LaFarge, SJ, and became a fiery champion of human dignity. His passion for the social apostolate led his provincial to send him to New Orleans in 1947 to found Loyola University’s Institute of Industrial Relations.

Among Jesuits, Twomey became known for Christ’s Blueprint for the South, a newsletter he began in 1948 for US Jesuits to discuss between themselves how best to promote Catholic social teaching. Its most popular column was “For the Asking,” which listed published resources on social justice that Twomey’s office would send upon request to any Jesuit anywhere in the world.

By the time Twomey died in 1969, the Blueprint had 3,000 subscribers in forty-four countries, reaching one in ten Jesuits.

When I began researching Twomey’s life for a planned biography, I did not expect to find that he knew King. No letters from King were listed in the Twomey Papers at Loyola, and no published sources mentioned any contact between the two men.

But then I met Father John Payne, SJ, who wrote a dissertation on Twomey nearly fifty years ago. It was he who revealed to me the existence of King’s letters to Twomey and Engler, of which he had copies—and he told me why they were not to be found in the Twomey Papers.

After Twomey’s death in 1969, Payne said, Engler used his authority as a dean to remove King’s letters from Loyola’s archive. When Loyola’s archivist begged him to return the letters, Engler provided only retyped copies. But the archivist avoided listing them in the Twomey Papers, perhaps hoping Engler would repent and return the originals.

Loyola’s current archivist, Trish Nugent, verified Payne’s account to me. So did a grandson of Engler, who added a sad detail: the original letters were lost in Hurricane Katrina.

King first wrote Twomey on April 14, 1954, from Boston University, where he was finishing his PhD. Earlier that day, he had written to Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, accepting the call to become its pastor.

“Dear and Reverend Father,” King typed, “I am deeply grateful for your encouragement during my last visit to New Orleans. We are beginning to move. With God’s Help, M.L. King, Jr.”

The "encouragement” Twomey gave King likely pertained to his desire to work for racial justice in the South. With his pastorate, King was “beginning to move” towards his goal—and “deeply grateful” to have an ally in Twomey.

Soon, Twomey’s colleague Engler was also writing to King, forwarding him resources on Twomey’s behalf—copies of “For the Asking” literature and of the Blueprint. Given that the Blueprint was for Jesuits only (as it critiqued the Society’s failures in social justice), Twomey's sharing it with King shows how much he trusted him.

Typical of King’s letters to Engler is one sent during the Montgomery boycott. King asked him to thank Twomey for sending him the Blueprint. “I need about a dozen copies of ‘The Fortieth Year’ [Pius XI’s Quadragesimo anno],” he added.

Why did Twomey avoid publicizing his friendship with King, so that most of his colleagues were unaware?

King’s letters suggest two reasons. First, Twomey advised King on how to reach Catholics who were, as King put it, “forcefully inactive.” Given U.S. Protestants’ prejudices against Jesuits, Twomey may have kept his advisory role secret to protect himself and King.

Second, Twomey would have been obliged to maintain discretion if he gave King spiritual guidance—and he may well have done so. On December 10, 1964, King, who had just accepted the Nobel Peace Prize, wrote to Engler from Oslo, “Tell Father the books were most welcome. I am tired, but I always find time to do what Father says.”

I have, however, found one instance when Twomey publicly spoke of knowing King. In February 1968, less than two months before King’s assassination, Twomey took questions on a radio station. A caller asked if communists were behind King and other Black leaders.

Twomey, an avowed anticommunist, replied that he was “a very ardent admirer" of King. “His whole approach to the racial problem has been scriptural, it’s been Christian, it’s been striving to animate people to be motivated by Christian principles,” he added. “I know Martin Luther King personally, and I consider him a really genuinely Christian man.”

Perhaps Twomey had in mind words that King spoke to him in February 1959—words that presaged his final speech.

In a letter to Engler, King recounted what he told his Jesuit friend: “The journey is long and perilous, but our goal will be attained, even though it may not be in my lifetime.”