AT BAYONET POINT : China, Holy Week, 1951 - a 1951 ejection from China is recounted by a member of the Sisters of Charity - Brief Article

Commonweal, Feb 23, 2001 by Mary Carita Pendergast

Perhaps it was fitting that our eviction from China took place during Holy Week, 1951. That was nearly fifty years ago, and the event is still indelibly etched on my memory.

There we stood huddled together amid a jeering crowd in a remote bus station of Hunan. We were nine Sisters of Charity garbed in shabby habits, ranging in age from thirty-two to sixty-nine. Our community had served the poor of the Yuanling Diocese for twenty-seven years. We were leaving a Chinese novice, who would die thirty years later in a prison labor camp, and the graves of three American and two Chinese sisters.

We had been handed exit visas five days earlier, with orders to leave with only a hand valise of baggage, and to provide our own transportation from Yuanling to Hong Kong. The Communists' occupation had begun eighteen months earlier; the takeover was gradual and well-planned. Their first action was directed toward our schools for girls, two elementary schools, and a middle and high school. When our Catholic principal refused to testify against us, they jailed her (she suffered eighteen years of imprisonment) and installed a Communist in her stead. Then they locked the doors of our free dispensary, and forbade mission personnel to enter our hundred-bed hospital and training school for nurses. They held a series of compulsory meetings, and warned the people against attending church services and the catechumenate. Next, they compelled the sisters to leave their convent and forbade the townspeople to lease us property. We had to turn to Bishop Cuthbert O'Gara for shelter in his rectory. (You can imagine the humor and the crowding in this situation!) Finally, the Communists turned their attention to the country mission at Wuki where the sisters conducted an orphanage, a school for girls, and a dispensary. The two sisters there were ordered to Yuanling, forced to make a tour of government offices in the biting cold, and then told to go to the bishop's already overcrowded premises. The end was in sight. A few days later, all the priests and sisters were marched to the yamen while the Christians didn't dare salute them or look at them.

On the morning of our departure, we attended Mass at 4 a.m., had breakfast with the assembled community of Passionist priests, said our farewells, and left. The bishop had chartered sampans, and several priests accompanied us. Our last view of Bishop O'Gara was of him standing on the beach, holding a lighted lantern, sheltered from the heavy rain by a huge paper umbrella raised over him by an aged Christian woman. In the deep darkness of the Yuan River we were aware of other sampans near us filled with noisy passengers, and we prepared for trouble.

When we disembarked, we were immediately surrounded by women soldiers who subjected us to a thorough and embarrassing search, and then led us to a double line of our own high school girls armed with sticks. We were ordered to run through this gauntlet and at the end to kneel and to apologize to the Chinese people for our offenses against them. Eight of us made it without hurt, for the girls would not raise their sticks. The last of our party was Sister Loretta Halligan, who refused to enter the double line. At that point, a soldier whispered to me, "Tell Sister Halligan to run the gauntlet, or she will be severely punished." I hastened to where she stood and whispered, "Run the gauntlet and at the end apologize for your errors with the Chinese." Her Irish blue eyes blazed with indignation and she exclaimed, "I crossed two oceans to serve these people. I never harmed anyone." I argued, "Come on, Loretta. Neither did the rest of us ever harm the people. But we have all run safely through the gauntlet, and apologized, for we certainly did make some mistakes." Sister Loretta was our superior, and in her misery and anxiety hadn't seen what was happening to the rest of us. She thought she was being singled out as our leader. Finally, she too went safely through the gauntlet.

Standing nearby, there was a woman eyeing me sympathetically, nodding in denial of the current goings-on. Then she noticed some soldiers watching her, and she raised a clenched fist and shook it in my face. There were several of these tragicomic happenings until we reached the railway station at Changsha. There we found that there were no longer first-class and second-class compartments, but hard-seat and soft-seat compartments. We were not surprised to find that we were denied soft seats for the long, overnight ride to Canton. At Hengyang, the station was crowded with recently arrived Russian soldiers, who peered in at us through the windows as curiously as we glanced out at them.

When we reached Canton, all the foreigners were ordered to stand in a row at the siding. We were five priests, nine Sisters of Charity, six Protestant missionaries, and two French consulate wives with their children; all were subject, without exception, to a humiliating search. Then the doors of the freight car opened, and two heavily armed soldiers jumped down and pulled down a small, thin white man, with long hair and unruly beard, trousers held up with a rope, and broken shoes. A European priest whispered, "A White Russian! They are worse off than we are." But the ragged little man glanced at the sisters in surprise out of bright blue eyes, and the word passed among the sisters, "Monsignor Dillon!" He nodded and smiled. He was the American Franciscan prefect apostolic of Shashih, in Hunan, who had spent eighty-five days in prison and had left behind several of his confreres in the same prison. We foreigners were then directed to a hotel just across from the train station, and Monsignor Dillon found himself in a room adjoining that of the other priests. They eventually carried on a conversation in Latin over the six-foot-high room dividers as the guards nodded in sleep. That night, a Chinese woman ran screaming through the hotel corridors claiming that foreign priests (all securely locked in their rooms with their soldier guards) had raped her. The next morning, we were ordered to report to the Alien Registration Bureau, but our progress was halted for more than an hour by a demonstration against foreigners, during which Maryknoll Bishop Francis X. Ford, who later died in prison, and his secretary, Sister Joan, were paraded in a truck to the jeers of the bystanders. This we witnessed before entering the bureau, where further rough treatment awaited us.