Father Bernard R. Hubbard, S.J.: ‘Glacier Priest’

“Nothing quite like it had happened before,” writes Rita H. DeLorme, about the 1942 visit of  the “Glacier Priest” to what was then the Savannah-Atlanta Diocese. Jesuit Father Bernard R. Hubbard “delivered lectures, illustrated with motion pictures, from Feb. 9-12, 1942, in four cities of the diocese,” DeLorme said in an article in the Sept. 29 issue of the Southern Cross, newspaper of the Savannah Diocese. “A world-renowned explorer of the Arctic, a geologist and expert in related fields, Hubbard was every boy’s hero and possibly every dad’s too.”

(Map image/courtesy of US Gen Web Project)

I had never heard of Father Hubbard before I ran across DeLorme’s article, but his life as priest, explorer, photographer and popular lecturer was fascinating. He spent some years as a faculty member at Santa Clara University in California, so check out its collection of his photographs.  Marywood University in Scranton, Pa., has a collection of archival materials on the priest and his expeditions, including correspondence, scrapbooks and news clippings about his adventures. The Online Archive of California also has a respository of Hubbard papers, as does the National Park Service. The list goes on.

According to DeLorme, Father Hubbard was given his nickname by guides when he was in Austria to study theology “and led expeditions to the Tyrolean Alps.” In 1927 he was sent to Alaska. “He became fascinated by what he found there, eventually leading 31 scientific expeditions into the country’s desolate regions. Soon, his face, voice and persona were familiar to movie audiences who saw films of his Alaskan adventures. Now he was in Georgia,” writes DeLorme, a volunteer in the Diocese of Savannah’s archives.