 Fr.
Louis Gerald Clark, OP
Gerald Clark was born in
Washington, Indiana on January 24, 1898. Just before beginning elementary school,
his family moved to Colorado and then to Los Angeles.
He went to St. Anthony’s Seminary in Santa Barbara, a Franciscan minor
seminary. After studying there for three
years, he was expelled for having “no vocation.”
It seems that the true reason was much more complicated. This is spelled out
in a letter to Fr. James Connolly, the Dominican Provincial.
I should
explain to you that, as one of the Franciscan Fathers wrote to me early in 1915 and as I
have been told by another, there was a general disturbance at the Santa Barbara college in
1914 and 1915. The Fathers were divided among themselves, and there quarrels were
known to the students. One of the professors, Father de Sales, a very bright man, devoted
to the boys, and admired by them for his ability, and his devotion to them, seems to have
been an object of envious and jealous feelings. In some way the boys learned of the
quarrels, and Father de Sales, with all his piety - and he has a lot of it - took a few of
them into his confidence. It appears that the superior at the time, as well as other
Fathers, turned against the boys who were under the influence of Father de Sales, and made
things unbearable for them. Two of them,
Glaser and Clark, who were specially close to Father de Sales, as I have seen from many
letters placed in my hands, manifested some resentment, in which their director
imprudently encouraged them, justifying himself and them on the ground that they were
merely acting in a manly way. One of them, Glaser, was expelled in November of 1914
I think; the troubles increased among the Fathers; the superior showed more and more a
want of tact in handling the situation; in February 1915 he expelled Clark; whereupon all
the students of the three upper classes left the college.
There was a great deal of feeling shown by the Fathers belonging to the various
communities, and efforts were made to have the boys go back; but the superior was against
taking them. Finally he was removed along
with other Fathers. Within a year or so a
number of the students have been admitted to the novitiate - some of those who were left
after I had made a choice.
There is also testimony by Fr.
de Sales, O.F.M. himself to the Diffinitorium of the Franciscan Monastery in St, Louis,
Missouri.
“The evil was briefly this.
There was a reign of terror and misrule. Excessive punishments were inflicted for
very slight breaches of discipline; the spy system obtained; certain students were
unfairly incriminated against; Frs. Rector and Sub-Rector openly manifested and expressed
aversion for the members of the three higher classes; the boys all noticed the persistent
opposition against one of the Fathers whom they knew to be working for their true
advancement intellectual and spiritual; several boys were expelled on insufficient
grounds….It was the same with the other boy, Gerald Clark; against whom however such
a tool was sought in vain. Yes, I heard Fr. Rector express his regret that the boy
committed nothing that would furnish a plausible reason to expel him. And up to the
last he had to admit, and admitted to the boy, that he had done nothing to deserve
expulsion, so he had recourse to the pretext—“No vocation,” and expelled
the boy who pleaded with tears that he was convinced that he was called to the Franciscan
Order, and that his confessor and spiritual director assured him that he had a true
vocation….Gerald was watched and hounded, treated unjustly and insulted…
Everything was observed, and carried to the Fathers. Yet even so nothing could be
found that on any way deserved the punishment which came at last to deprive him of his
only true home (his saintly mother died a few months ago), and throw him out upon the
world, and imperil, if not frustrate the vocation which he held dear and sacred, and loved
and fostered as his life’s ideal.
After
spending two years at St. Mary’s College in Oakland, he entered the Dominican
novitiate in 1917 in Somerset, Ohio for the Western Province, taking the name Louis. In addition to his regular formation courses, he
took courses in the sciences. In fact, he
received a Masters in 1923 and a Ph.D. in 1925 in Biology from Catholic University of
America (on the subject of the “origin of embryonic nerve fibers”).
Shortly after ordination, in 1924, he was sent to Catholic University in Louvain,
Belgium for his S.T.L. While there, he helped
arrange for four students to study in Belgium. In addition to getting his lectorate,
he took additional classes in biology and psychology.
During his two years in Belgium, he took the opportunity to travel around Europe a
great deal, especially enjoying Lisieux:
We stayed nine days at Lisieux, running
down to Alencon for one of them, and I don’t think I’ve ever enjoyed a trip more, even though it was raining miserably
all the time. At Lisieux I said four Masses
on the altar near the large reliquary of the Little Flower, and four in her bedroom at her
childhood home, the Buissonets. Our side trip
to Alencon, sixty miles south of Lisieux, was for her 53rd birthday, January 2nd,
when I had the happiness to read Mass in the room in which she was born and her mother
died. The home is owned now by an English
woman, a convert, the wife of the Presbyterian minister, Mr. Grant, who was miraculously
converted by the Little Flower. You never saw
anyone so enthusiastic. She is very much touched by the American devotion to the
Saint, and when she learned we were Americans, she didn’t stop at showing us the
chapel (bedroom) which alone is open to visitors, but took us all through the house, up
into the attic and out into the back yard, into Celine’s and Therese’s little
garden, and to cap the day had us stay to tea with her in the dining room where the little
Saint took her first meal with her family! She sent me to the cupboard ‘to get
cake for the tea from the same shelf from which Celine took the bread the Sunday she
forgot to bring home some ‘blessed’ bread for Therese.’ The Buissonets was
the best of all, of course, as it is richest in memories and souvenirs of the Saint, with
its room full of toys, etc; but everything we saw was very touching and very inspiring.
(from a letter by Fr. Clark in Louvain to the Provincial, January 14, 1926)
Upon his
return, he was appointed as a professor of philosophy and church history at Dominican
College in San Rafael. He then was assistant
in Seattle for four years and then became a professor in philosophy and fundamental
theology. The next year he was assigned to
Vallejo, California as an assistant and as a professor at Mission San Jose. His final assignment was in San Francisco. He died on April 4, 1945 at St. Joseph’s
Hospital in San Francisco.
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