PADRES WITH GUTS
Meyer, Ernest L.
Padres With Guts MEN OF MARYKNOLL, by James Keller and Meyer Berger. Scribner's. $2. Reviewed by Ernest L. Meyer IF YOU HAVE a notion that all missioners are sprouters of theological dialectics...
...Maybe you don't care whether a coolie learns the doxology...
...Truly these zealots of our day, with the world as a frontier, have carried forward the traditions of the padres of the 16th Century who voyaged courageously into our native backwoods when America was still the Great Unknown...
...Here is the factual story, gathered from records and transcribed into moving and dramatic narrative, of lone men ranged against lunacy...
...But you will care about what these Maryknoll men—and they never call themselves martyrs— achieved in terms of simple humanity against inhuman odds...
...Here is the saga of a dozen or more educated priests sent out from America to the dirty and dangerous corners of the earth...
...They have unbounded courage...
...For these Catholic Fathers—products of a training school on the Hudson—have far more than a religious apostolic enthusiasm...
...They have the imagination to accept conditions far out of their own experience...
...They have the patience and the humor to tolerate these conditions, and to mellow and modify them, with their energy and sweat rather than with sanctimoniousness...
...To leper colonies in South China, to the jungles in South America, to the bomb-swept and blasted acres of Hong Kong and the Philippines...
...Reviewed by Ernest L. Meyer IF YOU HAVE a notion that all missioners are sprouters of theological dialectics with both feet in heaven and none on the ground, then you will be disillusioned—and delightedly—by Men of Maryknoll...
Vol. 7 • December 1943 • No. 49
