The Happy Chaplain
Father Lawrence Farrell was a Monterey paisano, a World War II chaplain, a prison priest and everybody's favorite bon vivant
Rev. Lawrence Farrell fit right in. He was a genial chap, fresh out of a Catholic seminary, the son of a Welsh tavern owner who had married an Irish woman. He was from Monterey’s Spaghetti Hill, but he had somehow latched on with a bunch of soldiers from Newfoundland who fought Nazis across the pond in Europe.
Farrell thought of himself as Monterey’s first and only Irish paisano. But he was known as “Padre” among the soldiers attached to the 59th Newfoundland Heavy Artillery Regiment.
For the first several years of the war, he and the boys known as the “Newfoundlanders” remained in England, defending the country against Germans in actions like the Battle of Britain. Eventually Farrell and his unit were sent across the channel, via the beaches of Normandy, and the 59th fought with distinction in last-ditch Nazi attacks as it liberated a swath of Western Europe in the closing months of World War II.
Farrell stuck with the regiment from start to finish. He listened to soldiers’ confessions before battle. He set up pop-up altars and said mass wherever the grubby war took him. He prayed over the dead and he counseled the survivors. He was among the first to witness the remnant horrors of concentration camps after the German surrender.
It was a curious triangulation, a kid from Monterey ministering to soldiers from an island province off the coast of Canada fighting a war on behalf of England. But Lawrence Farrell was a curious man.
And when he returned to his hometown after the war, his outsized personality, his boundless talents and his unique ministries made him one of the most memorable religious characters on the Central Coast during the 20th Century.
Among the dozens of monuments and commemorative markers scattered about historic Monterey, you might discover a bench dedicated to the memory of Father Farrell in a corner of Memory Garden, behind Pacific House. The wooden bench has been there for a while, strong and sturdy, and the inscription summarizes the peculiar old soul:
“A true paisano, native son of Monterey and jealous guardian of the old pueblo's rich heritage. Army chaplain, prison padre, parish priest, linguist, poet, painter, sculptor, historian, writer, and wit, equally at home at pulpit or lectern. He of the golden voice, the swirling cape and flowing beard, bon vivant and great humanitarian. A kindly man and much loved.”
Parenthetical aside: Lawrence Farrell’s legacy hits home for us. In fact, his story actually opens and closes in the house in which we live.
I am writing these words from the Farrells’ Monterey home. Lawrence was born in this house, a year after it was built in 1906. His father died in one of these bedrooms. Farrell lived out his final decades in the studio apartment in the backyard.
When we look out the back window, we see an ornate iron cross Farrell affixed atop the white wooden wall that separates the home from the studio. The relic is another reminder that Father Farrell once lived here, that his spirit once filled this house.
With all the historic buildings around Monterey and given the priest’s stature in this town, you’d think the Farrell family home would qualify for a bronze plaque and a tax break. But, alas, we soon learned after moving here that “historic” only applies to a home’s outward appearance, and the exterior of this house has changed since it was first built.
For purposes of the city’s codified definition of history, the amazing spirit that once inhabited the space counts for nothing.
So who was this much-beloved charmer who once occupied our living space?
Lawrence Farrell’s father was born in Wales, started working the coal mines at age 6 and ended up in Monterey after stops in Australia and the Klondike. He had gone to Canada to mine for gold, and he’d managed enough of a nest egg to purchase the Majestic Saloon on Franklin and Alvarado street in Monterey in 1905. He married an Irish woman he’d met while she was visiting Monterey in 1906.
Lawrence Jr. was born in the modest wood home on Spaghetti Hill the next year. The neighborhood was full of life, with first- and second-generation fishing families from Italy, Portugal and other corners of the world. By his own account, Monterey was a welcoming community for a child in the early 1900s.
“Everyone knew everybody,” Farrell said during an interview in 1981. “Here in our Larkin Street gang there were no divisions of nationality or economic status. We all played together … There couldn’t have been a happier town to grow up in than Monterey.”
After two years at Monterey High, Farrell went off to seminary, first in Denver. After his father died, the seminarian went on to the University of Fribourg in Switzerland to continue his spiritual studies. He eventually finished up in the English city of Birmingham, where he was ordained a priest.
He was working as a chaplain in prisons and hospitals in Birmingham when World War II thundered across Europe. Farrell joined the Royal Army Chaplains Department for an infantry brigade in Ashford when he first met the soldiers from Newfoundland. They asked him to umpire a pick-up baseball game one day, and he ended up serving as their spiritual morale booster for the next four years.
The so-called Newfoundlanders were an odd bunch of servicemen from across the Atlantic. Newfoundland was then a dominion of the United Kingdom and young men from the island colonies were drafted to help their British brethren battle Nazis. Father Farrell was the sort of hale and good-humored civilian admired by military officers at the time. Also, the Padre was a bit of an oddity: an Irish pipe-smoking priest from California, of all places.
“Father Larry became a firm friend of the officers and men to whose spiritual needs he ministered and whose general welfare was his concern,” according to “More Fighting Newfoundlanders,” a history of the regiment's heroic exploits published in 1969. “During the Regiment’s long stay in England he accompanied it on many of its comings and goings. Whenever he was with it on one of its excursions he would celebrate Mass every day, using as a temporary chapel whatever accommodation was available — a barn, a stable, an old malt house, or perhaps a room in some ancient castle.”
After whiling away most of the war defending the British from its post in Ashford, the 59th was deployed to France a couple of weeks after D-Day, in 1944. Knowing how precarious their mission would be, Farrell took soldiers aside individually so they could make their confessions while they waited to cross the English Channel. Farrell’s regiment served as a “Liberation Army,” and soldiers encountered gunfire and bombings as they marched across France, through the Netherlands and into Germany. Father Larry accompanied them with a compact altar, setting up wherever they happened to be and bumming pipe tobacco along the way.
The regiment continued east as the war was coming to a merciful end, and Farrell witnessed horrific scenes of human devastation.
“Everywhere we go we have encountered hundreds of slave workers who had been ruthlessly taken from their homes and forced to work, unpaid, and for long hours on German farms,” the Padre wrote in a diary he dispatched from the field. “Some of them have heard no word from their homes or families for five years. French, Poles, Dutch, Ukrainian, Russians, Italians, a poorly clad, underfed, woe-be-gone looking lot.”
As they pushed forward, Father Farrell said Easter mass on April 1 at an old wayside shrine, accompanied by what he called the constant rumble of Allied tanks passing into the heart of Germany. From his makeshift altar, he noticed “soldiers lined up in front of the altar and behind them about a hundred of these recently liberated slave workers from every corner of Europe,” Farrell wrote. Afterwards, a soldier told him that an old Polish man wept through the entire mass, overcome by his new-found freedom.
Parenthetical aside: Soon after we moved to this house in Old Monterey, a neighbor named Bill Brown dropped by to tell us about Rev. Lawrence Farrell. Brown was Farrell’s much-younger cousin, and he told us that Farrell had been an avuncular and influential character in his life.
Brown and I have stayed in touch, and we have developed a friendship centered around our shared interest in Farrell.
Earlier this year, and much to his surprise, Brown was contacted by teachers at a private school in Ashford, England. Students at the Ashford School have conducted long-term research of the Newfoundlanders, and have discovered diaries — framed as newsletters — that Farrell wrote during the 59th Regiment’s deployment on the mainland of Europe. Farrell’s papers are kept at the National Archives in Kew, London.
Brown was invited to speak to students at Ashford via Zoom a couple of months ago about his memories of Farrell.
Nicu Munteanu, a teacher at the private school, told me via email that Farrell is a big deal at Ashford School. The school had been “occupied” by the Newfoundlanders in 1941, conducting anti-invasion and coastal defense duties until they deployed to Normandy.
Farrell is mentioned often and is a source for much of the information published in “More Fighting Newfoundlanders,” which is a sort of textbook for students who research the school’s history as a part of an Ashford School weekly activity named “History Around Us.”
“For these two reasons, as well as for the sheer evocative power of the Padre’s words written while on campaign in Europe, my students and I have been interested in him,” Munteanu wrote.
The Newfoundlanders arrived in Bergedorf, Germany, soon after the Nazi surrender on May 8, 1945. The regiment helped to oversee the prisons and the concentration camps in Bergedorf, just outside Hamburg, and to help nurse thousands of camp survivors back to health.
The following are shocking — and sometimes wistful — excerpts from some of Farrell’s newsletters, dispatched in the months after war ended in Europe:
“It is difficult for me to remember that just a month ago I saw (the Newfoundlanders) covered in mud and carrying 200 lb shells to their rapidly firing guns. It is even more difficult to remember the dust of Normandy, the mud of Flanders and the snow of Holland …”
“Behind the Police Station is a hospital where the prisoners of war from Poland, France, Russia and Italy are regaining their strength from years of starvation and ill-treatment. I said Mass there this morning and no words of mine can describe the pathetic shuffle of a man who has lived for 5 years under terror and under-nourishment …”
“In our area there is the concentration camp of Neuengamme, which is now used as a prisoner of war camp for 20,000 SS troops. Many of our men have visited this unbelievable institution of fear and organized murder. They have seen the three-tier bunks in the over-crowded wooden barracks behind electrified barbed wire. They have seen the cells for solitary confinement, the lethal gas chamber and the crematorium — a masterpiece of Nazi efficiency where the bodies of the murdered were burnt …”
“Our men have seen the floor littered with the shoes of the victims and the long high mounds of shoes, 80,000 pairs, and many of them are the shoes of little children. I saw a tall husky Newfoundlander turn pale and his jaw set as he looked at this evidence of organized cruelty. Our men who have seen Neuengamme do not have to be reminded of General Eisenhower’s ‘non-fraternization order.’”
Within a month after sending that final dispatch, Farrell was called home after learning that his mother had fallen dangerously ill. It is rumored that Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower himself intervened to secure Farrell’s quick passage to Monterey.
Parenthetical aside: Perhaps not so coincidentally, Mary Farrell’s health fully recovered within days after her son’s homecoming.
Mrs. Farrell had been one of the sprightly socialites in Monterey. She was in deep with the various civic clubs that hosted garden parties, balls, teas, luncheons and lectures. She was a ranking member of exclusive civic organizations like the Native Daughters of the American West, the Monterey Civic Club and the San Carlos Altar Society. And after the doctors had “cured” what ailed her after her son was safely back home, Mary Farrell returned to the social whirl without missing a beat.
Father Farrell did not go back to Germany after his mother’s miraculously swift recovery. The war had ended, after all. He was where he needed to be, home with his mother, awaiting his first assignment with the local diocese. For a time he made the rounds to local civic clubs. He was a popular guest speaker, a master orator with a booming voice who described what he witnessed during the war from the unique perspective of a Catholic priest.
During a presentation to a Rotary Club in Carmel in 1946, he detailed the horrors he encountered at the concentration camps. And he wondered aloud if such evil might be possible in the United States. Could such inhumane policies take hold here in the Land of Freedom? he asked.
It could indeed, he said, “if we blind ourselves to materialism, to ultra-nationalism, and fail to remember the golden rule, the principles on which our republic was founded — the right of each individual to freedom of thought and religion, to freedom from fear and want.”
Eventually, the bishop of the Monterey-Fresno diocese sent Farrell on a most improbable assignment, given his war experience. He was assigned to the California Correctional Facility for Women at Tehachapi. He made the long weekly commute from his Monterey home to serve as chaplain at the women’s prison for four years. When the new correctional facility for men opened closer to home, in Soledad, Farrell was reassigned to the Salinas Valley institution.
At Soledad Prison, Farrell led “therapy” groups for inmates, while also saying daily masses, novenas and benedictions. He counseled inmates to think of their time of incarceration as “a long retreat.”
Farrell became known as “The Prison Priest,” and his 27-year tenure at Soledad coincided with some tumultuous times at the penitentiary. He was around during several high-profile prison riots and during the turmoil that surrounded the Soledad Brothers. The Soledad Brothers case involved the death of a prison guard, followed by the dramatic shooting of a Superior Court judge in Marin County. One of the Soledad Brothers, George Jackson, was killed during an alleged escape attempt from San Quentin. The letters Jackson wrote from Soledad, published in book form about eight months before his death, were powerful appraisals of institutional racism in the United States.
Farrell wouldn’t talk in public about any of those episodes. But he became an outspoken advocate for prison reform and inmate rights. And he told whoever would listen that recreational drugs should be legalized. Prison life “is like being in the midst of a little war,” he told a reporter once. “The boys’ emotions, their reactions, their problems are all magnified.”
He said that too many of the inmates he met should have never been in prison to begin with, particularly those serving time due to their drug dependency. “No punishment is bad enough for the big boys, the ones who sell the stuff,” Farrell said. “But I’ve been in favor of legalizing drugs for years. Just decriminalizing so much of the behavior where people are hurting only themselves.”
Farrell was transferred out of Soledad in 1974, a move recorded by the Associated Press and carried in newspapers across the country. “We’re supposed to rehabilitate society’s failures?” he told the AP reporter. “Don’t believe it — they rehabilitate themselves. I expected 100 percent failure, each success was a miracle.”
In 1977, many of those miracles showed up at Memory Garden in Monterey for a big gala celebration to mark the 40th anniversary of his ordination. By then he had become a jolly, larger-than-life figure on the Monterey Peninsula. He was the priest always called upon whenever a civic function needed someone to open with God-related wisdom. Father Farrell basked in the local limelight. He wrote poetry for himself, and penned inspirational columns for the Carmel Pine Cone. He was named Monterey Citizen of the Year in 1973. He was known around town as a bon vivant who loved to travel to exotic places and who had amassed an enviable wine collection. In fact, for several years he was invited to describe the history of winemaking in California at various wine conventions and seminars.
So the 40th anniversary of Farrell’s ordination was a rollicking event, attended by more than 500 people. The party was featured in a lengthy story published in The Los Angeles Times.
The Times story included several testimonials from former inmates who said Farrell had made a huge impact on their lives.
“I really owe my life to Father Farrell,” said an ex-convict from Tehachapi. “I’ve rebuilt my whole life since those days. I don’t like to talk about them, but I do like to remember that it was Father Farrell who turned my life around. I’d go through fire for that man.”
But most of the story, written by reporter Dave Smith, described the raucous party for this big bearded bear of a priest.
“More than anything else he resembled a 300-pound imp, a cassocked rogue born to play Falstaff or Friar Tuck,” Smith wrote.
After the event, Smith and several select friends were invited to Farrell’s home — our home — for an after-party that continued through the evening.
Parenthetical aside: Father Farrell died on July 30, 1983, following a heart attack suffered in the studio behind our home. After the funeral and his burial, about 200 mourners were treated to a special feast at Crespi Hall — a steak-and-champagne feast that Farrell himself had arranged and paid for while making arrangements for his death.
Published Sources:
”More Fighting Newfoundlanders : a history of Newfoundland's fighting forces in the Second World War,” by Col. G.W.L. Nicholson, 1969
“Movement of the 59th (Nfld) Heavy Regt. R.A. Publicity for ______ in the ‘Newfoundland New’ and The Padre’s Newsletters.” Courtesy Ashford School via The National Archives.
The Monterey Peninsula Herald
The Salinas Californian
The Fresno Bee
The Los Angeles Times
The Carmel Pine Cone
The Farrell Bench in Memory Garden
Wow, you learned a lot about Father Farrell! Thanks for posting this wonderful article about the person who spent much of his life in the cottage where I now live.
Thanks, Joe, for another fascinating read. Personally, I'd love to read more from you about Spaghetti Hill and its historic standouts.