Facing Danger

by Francis J. Finn

Excerpt from Facing Danger

Here are several wonderful streets in the United States. New York has Broadway with its famous white lights; Chicago, which is nothing if not big, has Halsted Street, the long est, or, as a Chicagoan would say, the biggest street in the world. But most wonderful Of all is Canal Street; the sunny, the wide, the gay Canal Street in New Orleans.

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203 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1919

About the author

Father Francis J. Finn, S.J. was born to Irish immigrant parents at St. Louis, Missouri in 1859.

As a boy, Francis was deeply impressed with Cardinal Wiseman’s famous novel of the early Christian martyrs, Fabiola. After that, religion really began to mean something to him. Eleven-year-old Francis was a voracious reader; he read the works of Charles Dickens, devouring Nicholas Nickleby and The Pickwick Papers. From his First Communion at age 12, Francis began to desire to become a Jesuit priest; but then his fervor cooled, his grades dropped, and his vocation might have been lost except for Fr. Charles Coppens. Fr. Coppens urged Francis to apply himself to his Latin, to improve it by using an all-Latin prayerbook, and to read good Catholic books. Fr. Finn credited the saving of his vocation to this advice and to his membership in the Sodality of Our Lady.

After graduating from St. Louis University, he became a Jesuit and was ordained a priest in 1893. He had already begun writing his debut novel Tom Playfair prior to this, as he was assigned to St. Mary s College in Kansas and dealt with unruly boys on a daily basis. He went on to write twenty-seven other books, and his novels for children were very successful. The books contain fun stories, likeable characters and themes that remain current in today's world. Each story conveys an important moral precept. He was much loved by young people, and thousands of them gathered to honor his death in 1928.