I was born on July 30, 1905, in Seneca, Illinois, a village of about a thousand people located on the Illinois River 70 miles southwest of Chicago. My father, Elmer L. Ellis (d. 1945), was not a Catholic, but my mother, Ida C. Murphy (d. 1955), was, and so my brother and I were reared Catholics. I had an unexceptional childhood in circumstances that were neither rich nor poor, and which were marked, it now seems to me, by an unusual degree of security. So far as I can now recall I never experienced the inferiority complex from which many Catholics suffered because of their religion. It may be, indeed, that many Catholics of my parents' generation exaggerated the persecution they feared rather than experienced because of their religion.