God Still ‘In Charge’ for 100-Year-Old Maryknoll Sister

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Even while sitting on the cold, bare floor of a Communist prison in Canton awaiting her deportation from China in 1951, Sister Paulita Hoffmann, M.M., knew the answer to the question she was asking.

“I said, ‘Dear Lord, what am I doing here?’” recalled the still spunky nun who celebrated her 100th birthday Aug. 13 at the Maryknoll Sisters Center near Ossining. “Then I thought, ‘Well, He put me here.’ I’m here by the vow of obedience. This is where He wants me. So I kept sitting on my bottom until it hurt.”

Growing up in Cincinnati, Ohio, Sister Paulita always knew exactly what she wanted, or at least what the Lord wanted of her, and another thing she knew growing up was that she didn’t want to follow her older sister into teaching here in the United States. She had tried that, and it wasn’t for her.

Her eyes were set further afield.

“I wanted to go to China,” she explained to CNY in her tidy room at Sisters Center just a couple of days after celebrating her centennial. “I thought, ‘There are millions of people in other countries that have never had anyone give them the knowledge of Jesus Christ and I thought somebody should go.’”

Call it providential but it was on a shopping excursion with her mom one Saturday that Sister Paulita got her first clear sign that she might be able to realize her dream. After they finished shopping her mom decided they should go to confession. The priest who was hearing confessions that afternoon just happened to be a Maryknoll Father who was filling in at the parish. Following confession, when the priest asked the teenager if she had any questions, she confided her dream.

“I told him I didn’t want to be a teacher. I want to be a missioner and go to China,” she recalled. “But I said there is no way, and he said, ‘Oh yes, there is!’ He said ‘go to the rectory and wait for me.”’ There the priest gave the teenager the address in New York of Mother Mary Joseph Rogers, M.M foundress of the Maryknoll Sisters. Maryknoll at that time had an extensive missionary presence in China.

Thrilled, she wrote Sister Marry Joseph a letter and told her of her dream. Because she wasn’t quite ready to let her mother know of her plans yet she had return correspondence sent to a non-Catholic neighbor she used to run errands for.

One day her mom found the letters lying on a shelf in her daughter’s room and confronted her about them.

“I just told her I wanted to go to China. Those people have never heard the Word of God and that’s where I want to go!” she said. Fortunately her mom was more receptive than she thought she would be. But this being the Depression, money was hard to come by.

“I had to get my postulant’s outfit and I needed train fare to get from Cincinnati to New York,” she explained. Again her mother came through.

“She told me, ‘When your father died, the eight children were all put into his will. You’re the youngest and you get it when you are 21. But if it’s used for education you can get it before you’re 21.’ So we made an appointment, went to the lawyer and he said it was okay. So I think I got $500 and it took care of my train fare, my postulant’s outfit, everything to enter Maryknoll. What I had left, I gave to my mother.”

Sister Paulita entered Maryknoll in 1933. Five years later, she finally set sail for China, ironically on a Japanese steamship, she recalled. It was the height of the Japanese invasion of China. By the end of 1937 all major Chinese cities were under Japanese control. In the mountains, however, where Sister Paulita served, things were quieter. After a year of intensive study of the native language, including learning the all-important use of proper inflection, she began her ministry in Kaying.

Maryknoll Bishop Francis X. Ford, M.M., was the prefect of Kaying and he sent the sisters two by two into the countryside to spread the Good News, which was, of course, what she had signed up to do! She even had her own scooter.

“I had a Honda,” she recalled. “The priest said to get a 90 cc and I said, ‘I have all these books to carry in the front in a basket and the catechist on the back.’ I said we’d never make those hills. He said we’ll get you a 125, and he did. We couldn’t go all the way up but we could go two-thirds of the way. We’d chain the bike to a tree and walk the rest of the way because the path was too small for a motorcycle.

“It was during the war and all the men were in the army. So the women had to do the field work,” she recalled. “During the day we would visit the elderly people and we’d sit with them and memorize prayers.”

The war ended in 1945 but not the political upheaval. Civil war broke out between the Chinese nationalist government and the Communists almost as soon as the world war ended. By 1949 the Communists had seized power on the mainland and the Chinese Nationalists had retreated to Taiwan. The new government was highly suspicious of these American nuns.

Accused of being spies, Sister Paulita along with other Maryknoll missioners, would endure two years under house arrest in the village of Hingning. The wooden cross on the church was hauled down and used for firewood and the church was turned into a prison. Cursed at, spat upon, their veils torn off their heads, the sisters persevered. One day Sister Paulita and another sister were led into the village field to watch the kangaroo trial of their pastor, Father Aloysius Ao. He was convicted and led away. It was the last time they saw him. She also recalled seeing Bishop Ford being led away to eventual martyrdom. He died in prison in 1952. “He was all bound and tied with ropes and his hands behind his back,” she recalled.

Eventually the sisters were loaded into the back of a truck where they were they sat on bags of rice for a bumpy, two-day journey to Canton where they were to await deportation.

“When we got to Canton they put us in a prison room, nothing but three walls and one of bars,” she recalled. “I sat on the floor and I prayed Hail Marys by the thousands on my 10 fingers because we didn’t have anything else. I prayed Hail Marys all day long.”

On Dec. 13, 1951, after a year and a half in captivity, Sister Paulita, along with Sister Edith Rietz, M.M., crossed the border from what was commonly referred to in the Cold War vernacular of the time as “Red China” into the waiting arms of their Maryknoll Sisters in Hong Kong.

But Sister Paulita wasn’t finished with China. After two years working at the motherhouse in the United States she was assigned to Taiwan in 1954. She remained there until 2004, doing what she once dreamed of doing as a young girl growing up in the Midwest, bringing the Good News of Jesus Christ to people “who had never heard the Word of God.”

“It’s been a great life,” she said with a broad smile. “I wouldn’t give up a day of it! I never doubt God’s in charge. He’s in charge.”