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Fragments from My Autobiography, 1905–1942*
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2009
Extract
I was born on July 30, 1905, in Seneca, Illinois, a village of about a thousand people located on the Illinois River 70 miles southwest of Chicago. My father, Elmer L. Ellis (d. 1945), was not a Catholic, but my mother, Ida C. Murphy (d. 1955), was, and so my brother and I were reared Catholics. I had an unexceptional childhood in circumstances that were neither rich nor poor, and which were marked, it now seems to me, by an unusual degree of security. So far as I can now recall I never experienced the inferiority complex from which many Catholics suffered because of their religion. It may be, indeed, that many Catholics of my parents' generation exaggerated the persecution they feared rather than experienced because of their religion.
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- Copyright © University of Notre Dame 1974
References
* I am greatly indebted to my friend, Reverend Edward V. Cardinal, C.S.V., who kept all my letters through the years and has kindly allowed me to draw on them for this story.
The section of this article dealing with my time at Harvard was the subject of the third annual Thomas T. McAvoy Lecture at the University of Notre Dame, May 2, 1974, entitled “A Harvard Interval.”