Miles Lawrence Fay, SJ was born in New Bedford, Massachusetts, on June 27, 1921 to Gertrude W. Walsh Fay and Miles L. Fay. In 1940, Fay entered the Society of Jesus at Shadowbrook in Lenox, Massachusetts, and earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in philosophy from Weston College in 1946 and 1947, respectively. His first teaching assignment was at Fairfield College Preparatory School in Fairfield, Connecticut, from 1947 through 1950. Fay was ordained in 1953 by Richard Cushing, Archbishop of Boston and earned his licentiate in sacred theology at Weston College the following year. From 1955 until 1963, Fay was director of admissions at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, before becoming a faculty member at Boston College. He joined the Boston College theology department as an assistant professor in 1963, and was granted tenure in 1970. Fay primarily taught courses in the theology of Christ, the theology of divine presence, and on the Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, SJ. He went on to earn his doctorate in sacred theology from the University of St. Thomas Aquinas in Rome, Italy in 1970, and did post-doctoral study at Louvain University in Belgium in 1971.
Fay died at Youville Hospital in Cambridge, Massachusetts on October 14, 1990.
