Between 1942 and 1945, a Boston College Jesuit named John Patrick Foley (1904-1995) kept a diary of his experiences as a Navy chaplain in the North Africa and Pacific theaters of war. He wrote about the soldiers and sailors he came to know and minister to; of his first walk on a battlefield; of war news and rumor; of the striking beauty of the battle-ravaged Solomon Islands; and of the ruins of Tokyo. Transcribed and typed by Fr. Foley’s secretaries after he returned to his administrative post as a dean, the diary was in the New England Provincial Archive at the College of the Holy Cross when Joseph P. Duffy, S.J., a retired BC senior administrator with a deep interest in 20th century Jesuit history, came upon it and determined to develop it as a public document. Edited by Duffy and former Boston College Magazine editor Ben Birnbaum, “For God and Country,” with photographs and explanatory footnotes, can be read below as a flip book and will shortly be added to the “Duffy Collection” at the American Jesuit Archives and Research Center.
