Baudier’s true vocation as a Catholic journalist

    It was the 1930s, and Roger Baudier Sr., an ink-stained detective in relentless search of a dusty fact, usually had big plans for his large family on Sundays.
    As the editor of the Catholic Action of the South from 1933 to 1949, Baudier would have finished putting the weekly newspaper to bed on Fridays, leaving plenty of time for exciting Sunday excursions.
    At least, to him they were exciting.
    Instead of going to the beach, Baudier and his wife invariably would direct their car to some small south Louisiana church off a muddy trail, where the pastor was waiting for them after Mass to hand over his parish’s records.
    While Mom and the kids picnicked on the church lawn, Baudier went inside and went to work like a trained forensic scientist, copying by hand the pertinent details he needed to compile his seminal work, “The Catholic Church in Louisiana,” first commissioned by Archbishop John Shaw. Seventy-four years after its 1939 publication date, the 602-page book still is considered the bible chronicling the development of the early church in Louisiana.
    As the Clarion Herald approaches its 50th anniversary this month – our first issue as the successor of the Catholic Action of the South was printed on Feb. 28, 1963 – the revered figure of Baudier burns as brightly as ever in the memory of Rosemary Favaloro, who was married for 40 years to Roger Baudier Jr. and got to sit at her father-in-law’s elbow as he spun yarns about the church he knew better than anyone else.
    “When Roger and I would go over to his house for dinner, Roger’s mom, who was a very dear lady, always wanted to talk to me,” Favaloro, 88, said from her home in River Ridge. “But Roger Sr. was always telling stories, and out of the corner of my eye, I kept trying to hear what he was saying. When I went to Mount Carmel, all the nuns thought he was a giant. I thought he was a giant.”
    Baudier certainly was larger than life. When Favaloro and Roger Jr. were preparing to marry in May 1946 at old St. Dominic Church – the structure that now serves as the gym – Roger Sr. came to his future daughter-in-law with an enticing offer. Archbishop Joseph Rummel had offered to celebrate her wedding Mass, but because of protocol, it would have to be held privately in the archbishop’s chapel and not in her parish church.
    “He was going to give me a gold rosary,” Favaloro said with a laugh. “I would have loved to have Archbishop Rummel do it, but I had planned a big wedding and I already had arranged for Father Hall, who was the pastor at St. Dominic, to do it.”
    Favaloro got another taste of just how beloved Baudier was among the clergy when she walked down the aisle in her “illusion veil” and saw 17 priests – count ’em, 17 – sitting in the Baudier family section. This was before Vatican II allowed concelebration. That was five more priests than the number of flashbulbs her photographer had come armed with – film and flashbulbs were still hard to get after the war.  
    Besides Baudier’s church history books and his regular columns on Creole Catholicism in the Catholic Action, Baudier made himself available to seminarians whenever they were in a pinch, which partly explains his giant’s stature among the clergy.
    “He helped a lot of them with the theses that they had to write to graduate from the seminary,” Favaloro said. “He would always have priests over in the evenings, helping them with something.”
    The Baudier family home was a double with a large dining room. Right next to the dining room table was a small typewriter desk, where Baudier pounded out millions of words. There were large cabinets on the walls of his dining room. Instead of china, the cabinets contained boxes of accumulated papers, and Baudier knew where every sheet was.
    “He had such a wealth of knowledge in his mind, and he was always trying to get it down,” Favaloro said. “His desk at the Catholic Action on Natchez Street was piled with stuff, but he could put his finger on it and pull out exactly what he wanted. One day somebody went in and cleaned his desk, and he was so mad. He said, ‘I’ll never find anything!’ Nobody ever touched his stuff again.”
    No one ever saw Baudier without a coat and tie – that was proper Creole way. He was raised by a great aunt after both of his parents died within two weeks of each other when he was 8. He attended public grammar school in the French Quarter before entering a Franciscan minor seminary in California for high school just as WWI was starting.
    “He wanted to get into the war and get overseas,” Favaloro recalled. “He spoke beautiful Parisian French. He was originally turned down for the service, but they took him as an interpreter. He was just getting ready to go over to France when the war ended.”
    Baudier found his vocation as a husband, father and Catholic journalist. Dr. Charles Nolan, the former archdiocesan archivist, calls Baudier “the most prolific Southern Catholic writer and historian of the mid-1900s.” He very rarely worked without a cigar tucked in the corner of his mouth. Usually it wasn’t lit, Favaloro recalls, but he always knew it was there.
    The tobacco probably led to his cancer of the larynx, which finally forced Baudier to give up his full-time editor’s job with the Catholic Action in 1949. He had surgery to remove his larynx – “we didn’t know if he would survive the surgery,” Favaloro said – and he learned to speak by forming words with a reed-like device and that produced sound through an opening in his throat.
    For someone who spoke four languages fluently, the communications setback was not something he railed at.
    “He was always gracious, to the last years of his life,” Favaloro said. “My mother-in-law’s mind was really failing, and he was doing everything for her, as sick as he was. He never complained. He always had a laugh and a joke. I always said, ‘If anybody went right to heaven, he did.’”
      Baudier died in 1960 at the age of 67, but before that, Archbishop Rummel had Notre Dame Seminary bestow on him its first-ever first honorary doctor of laws degree. Favaloro remembers gift-wrapping for him a bound volume of Le Propagateur Catholique, the first Catholic newspaper in Louisiana (1842-64), so that Baudier could present it to Archbishop Rummel at the commencement exercises.
    That summed up Baudier: always the gracious gift-giver. And then he lifted up the two-inch rubber device to his throat and spoke into the microphone to 400 people.
    Precious, unrecorded, untyped words, from a man who made words his vocation.
    Peter Finney Jr. can be reached at [email protected].