Parting from Maryknoll

...Every part of the soil of our country had been fertilized by the blood of martyrs...

...But the Catholic nations that led the way in the discovery and conquest of America were not destined to hold the northern regions that are now the United States...

...tFilliams's paper, which has also been designed as a sketch of the work of Maryknoll...

...The tower of the huge building was curved at the top like a pagoda...

...To give knowledge of salvation to His people unto the remission of their sins...

...But all this could not be said any longer...

...The youth of America had not yet really been called...

...But he added something else...

...His words were the simple setting forth of the unalterable truth first uttered by the Captain of the army: that nothing at all in this world matters in comparison with the salvation of souls...

...Those already seated composed themselves expectantly...

...The color and sianificance of this rite form the subject of Mr...

...Father Elliott, the Paulist, and others as well...

...Marvelously vast had been the progress of the Church...

...For always there must be souls ready, willing, eager to give all...

...the strains of an organ, and men's voices chanting as a procession emerged from the great stone building into the court, and approached the altar, led by one who bore a crucifix...

...therefore, American Catholics were apostles...

...Their years of study were over...

...Or of bells struck by watchers giving warning of the approach of danger...

...All the faces lifted toward the bishop were lighted with that glow...

...Then amid incense and singing and lights, Benediction was given, and the ceremony was over...

...On the other hand, it was regarded as a certainty that money would be forthcoming to support mission effort, since the generosity of Catholic America was everywhere evident...

...Near at hand, you heard vibrant undertones~sweet, plaintive, yearning...

...What Father George G. Powers, one of the Maryknoll congregation, in his book, The Maryknoll Movement, describes as "the day-star of the American foreign mission movement," appeared in I896, when the archbishops of the United States formally authorized the establishment in this country of the Society for the Propagation of the Faith...

...It was only seventeen years ago, in t912, that Father James Anthony Walsh, the founder, and the present superior, with five companions, crowded into a carriage meant for four, holding a few oil lamps in their hands, and drove through the raw September evening to take possession of the property at Maryknoll...

...All these things are good in themselves...

...The deep silence deepened...

...Then he gave the triple blessing of his high office: that blessing which, then as always, passed beyond and above the personal mean...

...This endeavor is of interest to all ,tmericans, because it is a lofty expression of the religious idealism which, in spite of appearances, has been an essential aspect of the national culture.raThe Editors...

...Particularly significant were the verses: For thou shall go before the face of the Lord to prepare His ways...

...By far the greater number were upon a stone balcony that ran across the front of a great stone building facing the river with wings on either side forming three sides of a court, the fourth side being open to frame the hilltop, so that the people looked toward the bell and the open country below and the broad river, and the hills across the river...

...Nine of them had been newly ordained as priests...

...And in other parts of the world, in the school dedicated to Thdophane V& nard, the martyr, in Scranton, and in the school in California, and the mission stations in China and Manchuria and Japan and Korea, each departure ceremony at Maryknoll opens vacant places for eager aspirants, or provides more toilers in the field afar...

...and plenty of dollars...

...the call of heathendom, the voice of the world that is still shrouded in the darkness of the shadow of death...

...Their growth had been enormous since colonial times...

...And one of the Maryknoll priests approached the mother of one of the ten young men, and said, for he wished to comfort her: "Congratulations---and my deepest sympathy...

...Then their superior briefly spoke, and in his own words he said what their young companion Bishop had said...

...The contrary belief--an opinion, really, rather than a belief--of the unfitness of the youth of America for the missions was a widespread, but, after all, an untested assertion...

...another, very different sound took its place...

...And their superior was reminding them, and reminding their families, and reminding all of us, that only a very few years ago there were no seminaries for the training of American foreign missionaries...

...The youth of America had not been asked, as yet, to make the sacrifices necessary for the accomplishment of the ideals which statesmen had unfolded as the purpose of the struggle...

...Americans had proven that they indeed had other things than dollars to give: they had given, and increasingly would give, their lives...

...and their companions who, next year or in the years after that, will follow them, will come, as those before this year have come, from all parts of the United States...

...Youn 9 priests bound [or alien lands march in procession to the altar of Him they are to ser~e at whatever cost or peril...

...Opposite sat two bishops of the Church, and seminary professors, and their superior: veterans of that army which they were entering as recruits...

...606 T H E C O M M O N W E A L October 16, I929 PARTING FROM MARYKNOLL By MICHAEL WILLIAMS A BRONZE temple bell hung from a crossbar between two posts on a hilltop above the broad river drenched by the changing dyes of the sunset...

...As the sun dropped behind the western hills the sky changed from red to glowing gold, and above the gold it was purple, with a faint silver moon...

...nor by the building of churches and schools...

...There were strange things suggested by the sounds of that brazen bell...

...It must be so tomorrow...

...Therefore they must suf/er: souls could not be served or won except by and through sacrifice and suffering...

...The light had now gone from the earth, but in its withdrawal had concentrated itself in the sky in a serene glory of gold...

...but more tremendous by far had been the growth of the non-Catholic part of the population...

...Father Powers states the matter temperately and calmly in his introduction to the story of Maryknoll, in relating how Father Walsh came there, poor, literally as poor as the fishermen of Galilee who were the first Apostles, when the Catholic Missionary Society of America was first formed and authorized, and Maryknoll, says Father Powers, was thus born, in the richest country of the world, just a few years before the outbreak of the world war...

...And the young priests also bestowed their blessings...

...Flags and banners here and there were attached to the walls...

...to beg for a martyr's death more insistently than other men and women toil for dollars or for what this world calls success...

...On the balcony above them were their fathers and mothers, sisters and brothers, friends and visitors, and nuns and novices of the congregation, vowed as they were vowed to the central, predominant mission of the Catholic Church: the spreading of the Faith...

...On the other benches before the altar were their younger companions, not yet to be given their commissions, still to be trained and tested...

...That mother was the voice of the soul of Maryknoll...

...A great crowd of men, women and children became silent as the first stroke sounded...

...Steam heat, and bathrooms, and motor cars, and comforts of all sorts--these were American...

...Maryknoll, home of the Catholic Missionary Society of zlmerica, is faith/ul to an annual ceremony which has stirred numberless souls...

...And they answered with their Prepositum, their pledge to remain for life in the service of their congregation...

...but now it was not the brazen clangor of the heathen temple bell...

...their way to the altar, there to have a crucifix hung about their necks, there to pledge themselves for life to the service of Christ in His Church, as foreign missionaries, and from there they were starting at once on a journey of many thousands of miles, to the far distant lands from which the The tones were harsh, yet solemn...

...There are huge regions of our own country crying aloud for evangelists...

...it was the fine, silver tinkle of the bell announcing the approach of the Blessed Sacrament...

...To enlighten those who sit in darkness and the shadow of death...

...For a year they had been tentatively located at Hawthorne, six miles from Ossining, where Maryknoll is situated...

...So, too, in his own words, and as the representative of the Cardinal Archbishop of New York, spoke Bishop Dunn: whose own eyes had seen his American brothers at work in the fields afar: whose own ears had listened to the high praise bestowed by commanders of the army of Christ concerning the American recruits upon the frontiers of the Faith...

...For many years before that, Father Walsh, as diocesan director for the Society for the Propagation of the Faith in Boston, had been steadily though slowly moving toward the attempt to realize an ideal, namely, the establishment in the United States of a seminary for the training of foreign missionaries...

...Maryknoll and other places like it, thriving at last in the United States, are the proof of proofs of the strength of the Catholic faith...

...There had been no leaders for his undirected idealism...

...but if they were faithful, they could and they would rejoice in suffering and sacrifice: they would give up pleasure--yes...

...And, after all, Father Walsh, and those who believed as he didmreal leaders in the Church, bishops and priests and praying nuns---pinned their faith to something fundamental...

...Also, and here his words cut deeper, only a few years ago it was believed and said in Rome, and in France and Belgium and Spain and Germany, all over the Catholic world, indeed, it was believed and said that, while American Catholics were no doubt energetic at home, and were great builders and organizers at home, and very powerful and growing prodigiously at home, they obviously were unfit for the hard, stern, severe labors of the foreign missions...

...For there were ten young men in that procession, on great temple bell had come, the Orient...

...He had no seminary for his training...

...Father Walsh at least believed that souls as well as dollars would be found...

...But perhaps heavier even than the burden already resting upon American Catholics to maintain and spread their religion in their own country, which might well give them pause as the voices of the first pioneers of the foreign mission ideal were lifted, was the weight of another handicap...

...For all this happened here at home, on the banks of the Hudson River, not far from the toppling towers of New York City, and the ten young men were all Americans, from Rhode Island, and Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts, and New York...

...In the first issue of the Field Afar, the periodical which he founded to serve his cause, he referred to an editorial in a Boston paper about seven Presbyterian missioners leaving that city for India, and foretold the time to come when the papers would be printing the news of American Catholic missioners going forth...

...As was predicted, the dollars came to Maryknoll from generous Catholic America...

...Their superior advanced to the altar...

...So, indeed, were all the members of the Church, but they in a special manner...

...Foreign missionaries, beginning with the second voyage of Columbus, had brought the Faith...

...They are separate and indisputable proofs of the growth of the Church...

...She answered: "I'll only take your congratulations, father...

...One of the two bishops advanced to a pulpit...

...ing and warmth which, indeed, it also conveyed, becoming the vehicle for the communication of the spirit of the Church itself: the Church of the indwelling Christ...

...The tenth was a layman, a brother...

...A great part of the American dollars, it was true, went to the foreign mission field...

...And here at home it nourishes constantly that vision without which the nations perish...

...that only a few Americans had, as individuals, taken up this central labor of the Church...

...and all other sounds died away before the still small voice which made such a mighty announcement...

...And the superior took each one in his arms, and the lay brother as well, and gave them the kiss of peace, and the other priests advanced to share in it, and the seminarians and postulants sang the Departure Hymn: "Go forth, farewell for life, O dearest brothers I" And then a bell again was heard...

...Our young men were apparently in quest of material prosperity, pleasure and progress, and it was freely predicted that the great difficulty which the newly formed society must face would be the dearth of vocations...

...When, then, in I9o8, we ceased to be a mission land, American Catholics faced, as they face today, a great and divided task...

...he spoke of another motive for the life they were entering: a lesser motive, no doubt, but his words concerning it entered their hearts with a special force that could not help but strengthen them...

...Father Francis C. Kelley, now bishop of Oklahoma, and founder of the Church Extension Society which has accomplished such great things...

...It might well seem that every ounce of energy, physical, mental or spiritual, and that every Catholic man, woman or child, was needed to the exclusion of all other tasks for the maintenance and spreading of the Faith at home...

...But more is required...

...In the chapel in the great building behind them they had knelt for the last time at the Altar of the Relics, where stand enshrined a fragment of the True Cross, and relics of many martyrs, from Saint Paul, who died in Rome so long ago, to Th6ophane V6nard, who was beheaded in Tongkin only yesterday, as time counts in the Church...

...Once a year the temple bell clangs at Maryknoll, dolorous, strange, ominous...

...They chanted the glorious Canticle of Zachary, that noble burst of poetry and prophecy which united the Old and the New Law when Mary stood in the temple at Jerusalem with Christ in her arms two thousand years ago...

...but as a great American Paulist--Father Elliott--said in a letter to the superior of the congregation whose words are now being paraphrased: "Have the Catholics of America nothing but dollars to give...

...for priests, for nuns, for teachers, for catechists, for well-organized Catholic activities of all kinds...

...Two men in robes of black and white struck the bell alternately with heavy hammers...

...They stood or sat or knelt apart, these ten young men, during the ceremony that followed, grouped at one side of the altar...

...The tall slight figure of young Bishop Walshmwho only ten years ago had himself been a young man going forth on the way of the cross from this very spot, and who had only just come back from China for the first chapter of his congregation, and who soon would October I6, I929 THE COMMONWEAL 607 return to the field afar--was outlined against the golden sky...

...those who had been walking or standing at once sought their chairs...

...Other priests--only a few at that time-dreamed of the same ideal: Father Price, laboring as an apostle in North Carolina...

...Among the hierarchy, too, the vision was cherished...

...real faith, true Catholicism, must be apostolic...

...never, of course, too many, or even enough for all that had to be done, from the first scant repairing of farmhouse and barns, to the later extensions, and then the splendid seminary, still uncompleted, which came in time, and the houses for the sisters who followed their brothers in the Faith to the service of heroic Catholicity...

...nor by the mere growth of numbers...

...and once a year the procession moves to the altar of dedication from the altar of the martyrs, in the beauty of candles and flowers and vestments, amid the sweet scent of incense, to the music of the Church...

...The marks of ten years of exile and privation and suffering and incredible toil were on his face, and in his emaciated body...

...The breeze had passed with the sunset...

...And what about the souls ? The altar of the martyrs at Maryknoll before which young American men and women kneel, to be surcharged with the desire for self-sacrifice even to the giving up of life, is the proof that Catholic America does not measure its religion by the yard-stick of the dollar alone...

...The simple --profoundly simplemprayers of the Itinerarium, the prayers of the Church for her children who go on journeys, were said, and then the ten young men came and knelt before him, and he hung a crucifix on each one's breast and read aloud their names and the place to which each one was sent...

...one less obvious, but more dreaded by those pioneers than the burden, or the excuse, of home duties...

...They, the ten young men to whom he spoke, were pledged to the service of that truth...

...yet still the need for priests and nuns, teachers, catechists, philanthropic and educational and spiritual tasks of all sorts, right here at home, was of the most obvious urgency...

...Nobody who really doubted in his heart could have done what Father Walsh has done at Maryknoll...

...And it is so today...

...The sound of the temple bell ceased...

...They returned to their seats...

...and then they would know what happiness was...

...608 THE COMMONWEAL October t6, x929 The United States had only ceased in 19o8 to be a mission countryma land, that is, still under the direct jurisdiction of the Sacred Congregation of Propaganda Fide at Rome...

...Catholicism in the United States was a real thing, was the true faith...

...Heard afar off, they made you think of funeral bells tolling...

...The vast court was empty except for a row of benches arranged before an altar upon which candles burned and flickered in the soft breeze...

...but his voice expressed his spirit: strong, clear, serene...