John L. McKenzie

Who is John L. McKenzie?

John L. McKenzie was born on October 9, 1910, in Brazil, Indiana, the first of the six children of Myra and Harry McKenzie. John McKenzie became the premier Catholic Biblical scholar of the mid-twentieth century; indeed, John Courtney Murray, SJ, wrote that John McKenzie was “the best Catholic theologian he knew of in the United States.”

John McKenzie was interested in the Jesuits from an early age. At some significant sacrifice to his family, he was enrolled in a Jesuit boarding high school in St. Mary’s, Kansas, where he came first in his class three out of his four years there. After graduating in 1928, he entered the Chicago Province of the Society of Jesus and was ordained a priest in 1939. He was supposed to study theology in Rome, but the onset of World War II made that impossible. Consequently, he and others were required to study instead at the Weston School of Theology in Massachusetts. He received his Doctorate in Sacred Theology from Weston.

John McKenzie taught for nineteen years at the Jesuit Theologate in West Baden, Indiana, before transferring to Loyola University Chicago.