Br. Ignatius Matthias

Walter J. Downey was born the son of Edward and Anna on October 16, 1892, in De Kalb, Illinois. He entered the Novitiate at Glencoe, Missouri, on November 11, 1921, at age thirty. He received the habit in December of 1922 and the religious name of Brother Ignatius Matthias. His first teaching assignment took him to De La Salle High School in Minneapolis in 1923 and to Cretin High School in St. Paul in 1925, then on to St. Patrick's High School in Chicago in 1927. It was in 1928 that he received his Ph.B. from De Paul University and in 1930 his M.A. in English from DePaul. In 1930 he was assigned to Christian Brothers College in Memphis where he remained for fifteen years, until he returned to De La Salle in Chicago in 1945. One year later he returned to Memphis until 1949 when he went to Price College in Amarillo, Texas. He returned to De La Salle in Minneapolis in 1951 but after only a few short months he was reassigned to Memphis. Brother Matthias was assigned to Holy Family in Glencoe, but only remained one year before returning to Memphis where he died thirteen years later at age seventy-two, having been a De La Salle Christian Brother for forty-two years.