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“There’s always a Maryknoller in the air somewhere.” Father Edward Dougherty, M.M., superior general of the Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers, was fairly sure of that assertion. Over the past 100 years Maryknoll missioners have undoubtedly logged enough frequent flier miles to humble even the most peripatetic corporate road warrior.
Father John Barth, M.M., added to his miles when he departed for South Sudan Oct. 31 the day after a Mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral celebrated the 100th anniversary of Maryknoll, the overseas mission outreach society of the U.S. Catholic Church. For Father Barth this assignment to the world’s newest nation is why he became a Maryknoll priest.
“Very much! I asked for it,” the 58-year-old Buffalo native told Catholic New York when asked a few days before he left if he was looking forward to his latest assignment. He will administer a newly re-opened nursing school in an impoverished nation with one of the world’s worst public health situations and an infrastructure devastated by 22 years of war.
It is not unfamiliar terrain for Father Barth. The Maryknoller had seen similar devastation and destitution when he served nine years in Cambodia during the 1990s following the departure of the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime. Speaking of South Sudan, Father Barth said, “It’s a lot like Cambodia—post-civil war, shattered infrastructure, one of the worst infant mortality rates in the world, probably the bottom of heap for well-being.”
Traveling the Mekong River by wooden boat to deliver the sacraments to the local Catholic population, Father Barth had encountered many people who had been blinded by landmines and other causes. So he established a hospital south of Phnom Penh where doctors and nurses were trained to perform eye surgery. Now he is bringing the medical expertise gained in Cambodia to South Sudan. “This is where I find my priesthood,” he explained. “Working in solidarity with the poor and marginalized. Development work is an aspect of evangelization.”
Father Barth first discerned his vocation as a young man working on the U.S./Mexico border for a social justice organization called Los Ninos. “That was a big eye-opener for me,” he acknowledged, “seeing the contrast between rich and poor. It made me ask a lot of questions.” At the same time he was reading the various Maryknoll publications that he would see. Raised in a strong Catholic family, he entered Maryknoll in 1984 and was ordained in 1991. Father Barth’s story is archetypal.
Father Dougherty estimates there are now some 400 priests and brothers in the society; approximately half are in mission in the 27 countries, mostly in Asia, Africa and Latin America, where Maryknoll has a presence. Their personal stories may differ but all share certain missionary qualities: abiding faith, idealism and a deep social conscience. And perhaps one other.
“Restlessness is a good missionary quality,” Father Dougherty said. “I think of that because when I was first in Maryknoll I went over to Tanzania and when I came back and I talked to my classmates at St. Charles Borromeo Seminary, they were like, ‘Oh man, I could never do what you’ve done.’ And I said, ‘I don’t think I could ever do what you do.’ In Tanzania I had two parishes 70 miles one way and 50 miles another. I was riding a motorcycle and it was wide open. I grew up in inner-city Philadelphia and when I got to Africa and I see all this...”
Known formally as the Catholic Foreign Mission Society of the United States, Maryknoll was co-founded by Father James Anthony Walsh of Cambridge, Mass., and Father Thomas Frederick Price of Wilmington, N.C. in 1911. Both men shared a passion for missionary work at a time when the Church in the United States was just emerging from its status as a “missionary territory.” The idea of a specifically American approach to missions was a new one. But Fathers Walsh and Price submitted their proposal to the U.S. Catholic Bishops in 1911 and gained their approval and the blessing of Pope Pius X.
With Father Walsh as the first superior general, they set up operation on a 93-acre farm sitting on a hill overlooking the Hudson River in Ossining in 1912. They soon named the site Mary’s knoll.
“We had been deemed a mission territory by the Congregation for Evangelization,” Father Dougherty explained. “That’s when Walsh and Price kind of appeared on the scene. They began to talk to each other. They felt that the U.S. Church had to come into its own and make that quantum leap into being a mission-sending church.”
The first group of Maryknoll missioners set sail for China in 1918 with Father Price, who would die of appendicitis in Hong Kong a year later, as the group’s superior. The Maryknoll missioners quickly gained a reputation for innovation and adaptability. Soon their methods were being noticed and copied.
But as China descended into chaos, beginning with the Japanese invasion and occupation in the 1930s, then World War II, and finally with the rise of the Chinese Communists, the missionary road grew decidedly more dangerous.
When the Communists took power in 1949 foreign missionaries were deemed foreign spies. Bishop Francis X. Ford, M.M., who was among Maryknoll’s pioneers of 1918 and was ordained a bishop in 1935, was arrested with his secretary in 1950. The two of them were herded from town to town where they were beaten by mobs. Bishop Ford died in prison in 1952, so frail that a visitor described how another prisoner carried him “like a sack of potatoes.” On a memorial wall at Maryknoll’s headquarters hang the pictures of 13 martyred missioners. Another Maryknoll priest, Father James E. Walsh was arrested in 1959 and held 12 years in virtual isolation before he was released in 1970.
Despite or perhaps because of that tortured history, China retains a special place in the hearts of Maryknollers.
“When they in a sense opened China up and it became clear we were going to be allowed back in, you would have thought they said, ‘Gold rush!’ ” Father Dougherty said. “(Father) George Putnam had been happy in Tanzania and had been there 30 years but China was his first love and the next thing you know he’s in his early 70s and he’s back there.”
Meanwhile, Maryknoll was expanding its outreach throughout world. Vatican II put a new emphasis on social justice issues and solidarity with the poor and marginalized in missionary work. It was a model Maryknoll had pioneered in China.
“The Church didn’t do a lot of that before Vatican II,” explained Father Leo Shea, who chairs Maryknoll’s centennial committee. “But after Vatican II there was development in Latin America of the first offices for Justice and Peace. You had one in Peru started in 1966, 1973 in Chile. I was responsible for the one in Venezuela. I founded it around 1981. I lived in the slums of Venezuela for many years. It was a cardboard shack without any running water. But we lived there because we wanted to be in solidarity with those who were struggling. And that’s true today. We put people in strategic places where they are serving the needs of the poor.”
It is that spirit that sent the first Maryknoll missioners to China. It is why Father Barth got on a plane Monday and flew to South Sudan.
