Kenneth Baker, S.J.

Fr. Kenneth Baker, S.J. is a Roman Catholic priest in the Society of Jesus. Besides his pastoral duties as a priest he has served as a professor of theology and a university president. He has also worked to bring the message of the Roman Catholic Church into more forms of communication media, most notably as editor-in-chief in the magazine the Homiletic and Pastoral Review which has been called "one of the most important magazines for priests in the English speaking world".

Baker was born on November 12, 1929, to Catherine and Kenneth Baker Sr. in 1929 in Tacoma, Washington. Baker was born a month after the onset of the Great Depression. Under the economic stressors of the time Baker's parents' marriage dissolved and they got a divorce. Baker was given to Daniel and Mary Browne, his maternal grandparents, to raise. Baker had little contact with his parents and shared his grandparents home with their two youngest children, who were his aunt and uncle.

Baker's grandfather Daniel Browne worked as a dock worker and a construction foreman. Browne had traveled west from Nova Scotia and arrived at Spokane around 1900. He moved his family to Tacoma near the new port of Puget Sound in 1920. The booming trade with Asia increased the wealth of Tacoma and it was a large fashionable city when Baker grew up there.

Baker had not been baptized by his parents and neither his father nor his grandfather were Catholic. His grandmother was a practicing Catholic and desired that he attend parochial school at St. Leo Jesuit parish (rather than the local nearby public school). To facilitate this Baker was baptized at the age of five, and reportedly "thought very little of it, seeing it as just another part of starting school."

The parish school of St. Leo's was staffed by Franciscan Sisters who instructed Baker and his fellow students in their studies and in the Catholic faith. At this time Baker showed no signs of developing a vocation to the priesthood and at one point when the Sisters asked the boys in his class which of them would like to grow up and be priests, Baker was the only one who did not raise his hand. The young Baker got into "various kinds of trouble like other boys his age" and making use of the Catholic sacrament of confession officiated by Fr. Augustine Krebsbach.

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