I’m going to die, there’s no getting around that; everybody dies,” Jesuit Father Harry W. Tompson, his body wracked with cancer, recently told the Catholic Clarion Herald newspaper. Tompson, a native New Orleanian known for his honesty, drive, humanity and his love of a good time, then jokingly confided to interviewer Peter Finney Jr.: “I don’t want the word to get out that I’m eternal. That would cause some people difficulty.” Catholics and non-Catholics alike will no doubt smile, shake their heads and sigh with a familiar refrain heard long before Tompson died on April 5: “That’s so Harry.”

Funeral services were held for Tompson last week. He was 64. And he belonged to all of New Orleans. (To non-Catholics who struggled to address him properly, he would shrug: “Just call me Harry.”) Tompson left us a legacy of instructive stories as well as brick and mortar. As Archbishop Francis B. Schulte said: “Father Harry Tompson was a legendary priest in our community. He had the energy, vigor and passion that changed for the better everyone he touched.” We couldn’t agree more.

A former president and principal of Jesuit High School and a pastor of Immaculate Conception Church, Tompson inspired many New Orleanians with his often humorous and always candid approach to life’s tough times. He used the pulpit to campaign relentlessly against New Orleans’ many social ills, including poverty, ignorance, racism, hunger, alcoholism and teen suicides. He drew on his own painful childhood experience to comfort and motivate the city’s youth. “Life is either a blessing for growth or a curse that cripples — and you decide,” said Tompson, a recovering alcoholic and son of an abusive and alcoholic father.

“My ‘gift’ was my Daddy’s alcoholism, so I could help those kids who really were the outcasts,” Tompson said in an interview with Archbishop Phillip Hannan and Mary Lou McCall, on the Focus Worldwide TV Network. “I knew what it meant to be afraid all the time, as they are.”

Referring to a string of teen suicides at Jesuit during the 1990s, Tompson said one of the problems facing adolescent boys and girls is that they often don’t perceive that they are loved. He urged parents to do three things: “I would tell parents to constantly check out with the kid, ‘Do you know that we love you; do you feel that we love you?’ And if the kid says no, don’t say ‘Well that’s ridiculous! We love you!’ Say ‘Why?’ Then close your mouth so they can tell you. And then, the third thing is to believe what they tell you.”

After 13 years as a Jesuit administrator, Tompson became pastor of Immaculate Conception in 1994, where he began the work that will be his brick-and-mortar legacy. The Good Shepherd School will serve New Orleans’ at-risk children. “Now I want the other end of the spectrum — children who … don’t have what most of the kids at Jesuit High had: cars, gas, homes, mommies and daddies, trips,” he told the Clarion Herald.

Located across street from Tompson’s old church in the heart of downtown, Good Shepherd is now under construction at the site of the old Kancher Furniture Store at 353 Baronne St. Begun with an anonymous donation of $600,000, the $1.5 million renovation project is scheduled for completion late this summer. Thirty of New Orleans’ poorest young students will enter the tuition-free private school on opening day, 15 each in kindergarten and first grade. One grade will be added each year until the school comprises grades K-8.

The school is modeled after other Jesuit-run “nativity” schools nationwide. Students will receive intensive academic and spiritual training during an extended school day, from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. The year-round school will include extracurricular activities and summer classes.

The school is working to create an endowment fund of up to $7 million. Led by campaign chair David Voelker, Good Shepherd staged its gala fundraiser at the New Orleans Hilton on Jan. 12. Several hundred people attended, including many of the metro area’s elite. Many were Tompson’s students at Jesuit. “We’re going to take these young children and help them understand there is love in the world,” Tompson said at the event, his pointing finger sweeping the affluent crowd. “You and I are going to take care of them. You and I are going to take care of these children.”

On the day of his funeral, the hearse carrying Harry Tompson’s body pulled away from Immaculate Conception Church, then stopped briefly in front of the site of Good Shepherd. The construction workers stopped working and came out to the sidewalk, where they quietly removed their hard hats. The hearse pulled slowly away, taking a Good Shepherd to his final resting place in Grand Coteau, La.


Tompson’s family requests that any donations be sent to Good Shepherd School, P.O. Box 2290, New Orleans, LA 70176-2290.