Joseph Murphy

Joseph Denis Murphy was an Irish author and New Thought minister, ordained in Divine Science and Religious Science. Murphy was born in Ballydehob, County Cork, Ireland, the son of a private boys' school headmaster and raised a Roman Catholic. He joined the Jesuits. Murphy was enrolled in the National School and was encouraged to study for the priesthood and was accepted as a Jesuit seminarian. However, by the time he reached his late teen years, he began to question the Catholic orthodoxy of the Jesuits, and he withdrew from the seminary. His goal was to explore new ideas and gain new experiences—a goal he could not pursue in Catholic-dominated Ireland—he left his family to go to America. In his twenties, before being ordained a priest, an experience with healing prayer led him to leave the Jesuits and emigrate to the United States in 1922, He journeyed as a steerage passenger on board the RMS Cedric, sailing from Liverpool, England, to the Port of New York; on the ship's passenger manifest, his occupation was listed as chemist, the British term for pharmacist. He became a professional pharmacist in New York City (having a degree in chemistry by that time). Here he attended the Church of the Healing Christ (part of the Church of Divine Science), where Emmet Fox had become minister in 1931. Murphy traveled to India and spent a lot of time with Indian sages, learning Hindu philosophy. He later on formed a new church in America with Hindu ideologies. In the mid-1940s, he moved to Los Angeles, where he met Religious Science founder Ernest Holmes, and was ordained into Relig