B. J. (Benedict Joseph) Murdoch

Born in Chatham, New Brunswick, in 1886, Benedict Joseph Murdoch studied at St. Dunstan’s College and then at the Grand Seminary in Quebec before being ordained as a Roman Catholic priest in 1911. He later served as a military chaplain with the 132nd Battalion during the First World War, with service that took him through England and continental Europe.

Murdoch is best known for The Red Vineyard, his memoir of wartime chaplaincy, first published in 1923. The book stands out as a rare Canadian first-hand account of chaplaincy in the Great War, and readers still value it for its clear eye, emotional honesty, and attention to both suffering and beauty.

He also wrote fiction and became known in his lifetime as the “Shepherd of the Woods.” Sources from New Brunswick literary and historical organizations describe him as a priest-writer whose later years were spent in relative seclusion in the woods of New Brunswick, where he died in 1973.