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(Excerpt from The Little Known Side of Edmund Walsh: His Mission to Russia in the Service of the Holy See - Studi sull'Oriente Cristiano, Vol. 14/1, 2010)

Father Walsh remains particularly well remembered on the Georgetown campus due to the institution he founded in 1919 and which, since 1958, bears his name: the “Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service” – the very first American educational program dedicated to preparing students for international service in diplomacy and business. Regent of this institution from 1919 to 1921 and 1924 to 1952 (the interruption corresponds with the completion of his final year of Jesuit studies in Paray-le-Monial, France, and his Papal mission in Russia), the care that he showed in nurturing this School throughout his life at Georgetown and the significant results which this educational program has obtained would indeed provide reason enough to justify the esteem which is generally accorded Father Walsh. But, as befits the founder of such a prestigious institution, Edmund Walsh’s personal services as an international diplomat (he represented at various times both the Holy See and the United States government) and his intensive activity as an author and lecturer in the advocacy of his geo-political views, were equally significant facets of his life and were, in fact, to reach far beyond the boundaries of his University to leave a lasting imprint upon the United States and upon international relations.

Pope Pius XI conferred several assignments on Father Walsh: three diplomatic missions - the direction of the Vatican’s program for famine relief in Russia (Papal Relief Mission to Russia) in 1922-23, a mission to aid in the settlement of the Church-State conflict between the Catholic Church and the Mexican revolutionary government in 1929, a mission to Iraq in 1931 which resulted in the establishment of a Jesuit led High School in Baghdad (Baghdad College) – and a Papal assignment to organize and direct “The Catholic Near East Welfare Association” (CNEWA) a large American fund raising association described by Walsh as “A Society in Aid of Catholic Interests in Russia and the Near East”) from 1926 through 1931. As diplomatic missions go, a more diverse array of challenging political and social conditions would be difficult to imagine – Bolshevist Russia caught in a merciless famine, Mexico during the “Cristero Rebellion” and Baghdad just at the moment of Iraq’s transition from British mandate to independent state. Each situation totally different, each situation fraught with tension and requiring a great deal of political acumen in order to achieve satisfactory results.

The American government also entrusted Father Walsh with a series of responsible positions. The first one, in fact, foreshadowed that which would become his lifelong involvement with U.S. government military matters. In 1918, shortly after his appointment in May as Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Georgetown University, he was called to Boston by the United States War Department to become Assistant Educational Director for the New England States of the newly formed Student Army Training Corps (S.A.T.C.).

He became, essentially, a personal liaison between the Army and the New England Colleges and Universities – many of which were converted into units of the S.A.T.C. – and dealt directly with issues involving student induction and the adjustment of college schedules to Army requirements (1918 to January 1919). In 1942, he was appointed Consultant and Lecturer by the Geopolitical Division of the War Department and carried out lectures and courses at major Army centers throughout the country. From 1945-46, he was consultant to the U.S. Chief of Counsel, Judge Robert H. Jackson, at the Nuremburg War Trials researching and giving advice on matters relating to Nazi religious persecution and the role of Karl Haushofer, the geopolitical theoretician whose ideas regarding “Lebensraum” were adopted by the Nazi regime. In 1946 he was selected by President Harry S. Truman as a member of a 9 person civilian commission, the “President’s Advisory Commission on Universal Military Training” and, from 1948 through 1951, he was a member of President Truman’s “Committee on Religion and Welfare in the Armed Forces”.

In Washington, he was a well known public figure – not only due to his association with Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service and the reputation it was rapidly acquiring, but also because of the public stances he took on a number of important issues having to do directly with the political life of the United States. He was, most certainly, not the type to hide his opinions, nor to ask others to express them for him. In fact, for 18 years beginning in 1924, immediately following his return from Russia, he delivered a public lecture series which was devoted to Russia and the dangers which international communist expansion posed to the free world. This annual series of ten to fourteen lectures was widely attended by the Washington public and provided Father Walsh with an ample and on-going forum from which to voice his concerns. ...........

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