By Tom Plate
LOS ANGELES ― How should the worth of a life be weighed? For when a phenomenon like Father John P. Daly, S.J., dies, that’s a question you start asking yourself. What is a life worth?
In his own over-intellectualized Harvard way, T.S. Eliot used to tantalize around that question with this unforgettable line from the “Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” poem: “I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.”
But the life of Daly, a longtime faculty member of Loyola Marymount University (LMU) here, was immeasurably too unique and real for such sterile ― not to mention sardonic ― gradations. On a life canvas that would have filled up the rooms of a mansion, this Jesuit visionary, a child of the U.S. Midwest, took Catholic America into Asia basically as an educational pioneer.