Fr. Ernest Falardeau SSS
A native of Holyoke, Massachusetts, Fr. Ernest Falardeau, SSS is a member of the Blessed Sacrament Fathers and Brothers, ordained to the Roman Catholic priesthood in 1956. He served the Archdiocese of Santa Fe, New Mexico as the Director of Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs from 1979 through 2003.
He is a past president of the National Association of Diocesan Ecumenical Officers as well as a past president of the North American Academy of Ecumenists. He was senior associate of St. Jean Baptiste Parish in Upper East Side Manhattan, New York, where he served on the New York Archdiocesan Commission for Anglican-Roman Catholic relations. He now resides in Cleveland, Ohio.
Fr. Falardeau was active in the cause of Christian unity in the Diocese of Cleveland, Ohio and in the Mid-Hudson, New York area where he helped to form the Duchess County Interfaith Council which he served as its first president (1971-1972).
Fr. Falardeau received his doctorate in Sacred Theology from the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome in 1959. He has written extensively for Catholic periodicals and has published three books on the Eucharist from an ecumenical point of view: “One Bread and Cup: Source of Communion” (Michael Glazier, 1987), “A Holy and Living Sacrifice: the Eucharist in Christian Perspective” (Liturgical Press, 1996),and “That All May Be One: Catholic Reflections on Christian Unity” (Paulist Press, 2000).
Fr. Falardeau has received a number of awards for his ecumenical ministry, notably the 1997 James Fitzgerald Award “for outstanding contribution and service to Christian unity” by the National Association of Diocesan Ecumenical Officers (NADEO). In 2003, the Archdiocese of Santa Fe, New Mexico, honored him with the Twenty-four Years of Service Award. The New Mexico Conference of Churches awarded him the Pioneer Award in 1989, and its first Turquoise Chalice Award in October, 2003.
Watch an Interview with Fr. Falardeau, SSS
