Catholic Heroes

> The Jap sailor wasn't really planning to kill Father Joyce when he stood him up at ten paces on Sancian Island; it was just a game when he put a bullet through his cassock. But the missionary from Maryknoll thought his last moment was at hand. Now he knows how he will act if martyrdom really comes to him. He tried to look unconcerned, and he prayed. Not until hours later did he realize, "quite mortified," that he had said the grace before meals instead of the Act of Contrition.

> Father Joseph Sweeney tried to run the Jap blockade on a Chinese coaster with a vitally needed load of medicine for his leper colony. When two gunboats shelled the ship he slipped overboard and swam six hours before reaching shore. Now, despite the spread of the war, he is busy as ever among his lepers.

> Four Maryknoll Sisters rode bicycles for six days over torn roads to get to their mission in the interior of South China. War does not stop the nuns. They have opened five new missions in China since the Sino-Japanese War began.

> When Maryknoll's first martyr was kidnapped by bandits from his mission in Manchukuo and strangled, New York's Archbishop Francis J. Spellman wrote: "In many a missionary heart there throbs a holy envy of Father Gerard Donovan."

> A Maryknoller is the Roman Catholic chaplain on exposed Midway Island, 1,300 miles northwest of Hawaii, from which the Japs have been repeatedly beaten off.

The files of Maryknoll Seminary are filled with such instances of heroism. No religious institution in America has so many of its alumni in the Japanese war zone. More than 450 nuns and priests from Maryknoll are in the Orient. Save for a few sick or on furlough, they have stuck at their posts through the years of mounting tension. Once assigned to a field, Roman Catholic missionaries generally stay there for the rest of their lives.

U.S. Catholics were more than a century behind U.S. Protestants in sending out foreign missions. Until 1908, in fact, the U.S. was still a mission land itself. Only in 1911 did Pope Pius X authorize the establishment of the Catholic Foreign Mission Society of America, popularly known as Maryknoll, after the name of its headquarters near Ossining, N.Y., on a hill overlooking the Hudson. Not until 1918, after seven years' thorough preparation, did the society send out American Catholicism's first mission band of four priests to China.

Now, only 23 years later, it and its affiliate, the Maryknoll Sisters, number over 1,300 priests, brothers, sisters and candidates, are also training 350 natives in the Orient as priests and nuns.

In seven missionary districts in South China, Korea, Manchukuo and Japan, Maryknollers are working, converting 7,500 adults a year. Maryknoll is still the largest U.S. Catholic missionary group, but others have followed its lead; there are now 2,500 American Catholic missionaries stationed overseas, a majority of them in the Orient.

Present head of Maryknoll is slight, twinkling-eyed Bishop James Edward Walsh, who entered Maryknoll its first year and was in the first overseas contingent. He became U.S. Catholicism's first missionary bishop in 1927, when he was consecrated vicar apostolic of Kongmoon. With 18 years' experience in China, including the anti-foreign riots of the '20s, Bishop Walsh says: "We have already faced more critical moments in the past few years than anything we anticipate from the present war. . . . Maryknoll missioners are staying where they are and doing what they can."

News of Maryknollers in the Orient has shrunk to a trickle since Dec. 7. But cables received early this month reported that:

> "Everything quiet here. All Maryknollers free"--from the 54 in the Philippines.

> "All Maryknollers are in good health"--the 58 in Manchukuo.

> Of the 52 in Hong Kong, the sisters are restricted in their movements but permitted to do part of their pastoral work; the priests were first put in prison, are now interned.

No direct word has been heard from Maryknollers in Korea. But in Japan all the priests except two over military age have been interned. The 124 carrying on in South China are reported well and active.

Now that the U.S. is cut off from the Orient, no missionaries can be sent there from Maryknoll this year. Instead, the Vatican has assigned the society a new missionary field among the pagan Indians in the forests of northern Bolivia, east of the Andes. Three missionaries will leave Maryknoll for the upper Amazon region on Easter Day; 17 more will follow after the June ordinations.

The retiring Archbishop of Canterbury (TIME, Feb. 2) was made a baron last week.

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