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About
Father Judge & the Founding of Trinity Missions
The story of Trinity Missions begins with Father Thomas Augustine Judge. Born in Boston in 1868 of Irish immigrant parents, he was one of five children. When Tom was only 18 his father died, and he had to leave school to help support the family. By 1890, the family had stabilized sufficiently for him to do what he had silently dreamt of for many years: becoming a Vincentian priest.
Ordained in 1899, Father Judge showed, from the earliest days of his priesthood, an intense interest in what he called leakage from the Church: hundreds of thousands of baptized Catholics, many of the newly arrived immigrants, lost to the faith through neglect, ignorance, or the negative effects of their new environment. He slowly came to one outstanding conviction. The only realistic solution to the needs of God’s abandoned people, was a missionary minded, highly spiritual, zealous Catholic laity. Every Catholic is called to be an apostle!
Father Judge began organizing groups of dedicated lay missionaries in the northeastern United States in 1909. Their gatherings became known as Missionary Cenacles after the Upper Room where the Holy Spirit came upon the first Apostles. Sent as pastor, in 1915, to the Vincentian mission in Opelika, Alabama, he quickly saw that he alone could never effect any change in an area rife with anti-Catholic hatred.
He sought the help of the Missionary Cenacle members from the north. The first six volunteers arrived in January 1916. They stayed, and many other apostolic-minded men and women began to follow.
By 1919, some of the early women volunteers banded together under Father Judge’s direction, to form a religious community dedicated to the work of the Missionary Cenacle. They took the title of Missionary Servants of the Blessed Trinity.
In 1924, some of the men volunteers became the first Missionary Servant priests and Brothers. This community took the title of Missionary Servants of the Most Holy Trinity (Trinity Missions.)
Father Judge continued to guide the growing movement. He traveled continuously, writing, preaching, visiting the different missionary works and initiating new ones throughout the United States and Puerto Rico. He died on November 23, 1933, worn out by a life of intense missionary labor.
Father Judge’s words and deeds guide us even today. Join us as we strive to live these words in the daily providence of our lives — “Be good, do good, make others do good.”
