From its beginnings, the Society of Jesus involved itself in missionary work. St. Ignatius went to Jerusalem in hopes of converting Muslims to Christianity and later sent St. Francis Xavier to the Far East to share the Gospel of Christ. The Jesuits who came from Europe to establish schools and parishes throughout California and the Northwest in the 1800s were carrying on that missionary tradition.
Many priests who were SI alumni also served as missionaries starting in 1928 when Joseph Lo Pahong, a Shanghai businessman, persuaded Pope Pius XI and Jesuit General Wlodimir Ledochowski to send California Jesuits overseas to assist the French Jesuits in their efforts in the Shanghai Mission Territory. Their work in China continued through war and revolution, eventually extending from China to Japan, the Philippines and Taiwan.
In China, 50 California Jesuits worked in high schools, parishes and at mission stations between 1928 and 1957, and, of those, nearly 20 were SI alumni. With the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese war in 1937, the work of the Jesuits shifted to aiding refugees. Some Jesuits spent much of World War II in Japanese internment camps in Yangzhou and Shanghai, while others, including Fr. Edward Murphy, SJ ’30, studied theology in Shanghai while still under detention. (Fr. Murphy later became the first Jesuit ever to serve in Taiwan since the Jesuits left that island in the 1700s.) When the Communists took over in 1949, the Jesuits struggled to continue their work despite imprisonment, attempted brainwashing and expulsion.
One of the last two Jesuits to be imprisoned by the Red Chinese was Fr. Charles McCarthy, SJ ’29. He arrived in China in 1941 and spent more than two years in a Japanese internment camp during WWII. In 1953, while rector of the Bellarmine Theologate in Shanghai, he was jailed by the Chinese Communists, and served four years in five different prisons. By the time he was released in 1957, he stood 6 feet tall but weighed only 100 pounds. After regaining his health and strength in California, he served in the Philippines for more than 30 years, working for the assimilation and naturalization of Filipino-Chinese, writing three books on the Chinese in South East Asia, and heading various research and educational programs. Walter McCarthy ’33 established the Rev. Charles J. McCarthy, SJ, Scholarship in memory of his brother.
Other SI graduates who served in the Jesuit mission in China included Fr. Ralph Brown, SJ ’32, Fr.Daniel Clifford, SJ ’29, Fr. John W. Clifford, SJ ’35, Fr. Albert Corcoran, SJ ’21, Fr. Ralph Deward, SJ ’25, Fr. George Donohoe, SJ ’39, Fr. Joseph Donohoe, SJ ’33, Rev. Msgr. Eugene Fahy, SJ ’29 (who, with the title vicar apostolic, held the rank of a bishop), Fr. John J. Gordon, SJ ’30, Fr. John Lennon, SJ (SI 1905), Fr. John Magner, SJ ’20, Fr. John Moholy, SJ ’30, Fr. Paul O’Brien, SJ ’25 (appointed the first superior of California Jesuits in China in 1945, in charge of all non-Chinese Jesuits), and Fr. Gerald Pope, SJ ’27.
The most prominent of the above-mentioned, Rev. Msgr. Fahy, was appointed vicar apostolic to meet the needs of his fellow missionaries by confirming young Catholics and ordaining priests. He began his service in China in 1941, learning Chinese from the French Jesuits at the Maison Chabanel in Beijing. The Japanese interned him in 1942, though he was allowed to continue his theology studies and was ordained in 1945. He received the title Prefecture Apostolic in 1949 and Prefect Apostolic of Yangzhou in 1951, the year he was imprisoned by the Chinese Communist Party. After his expulsion in 1952, he served in Taiwan until 1962 when he left to attend sessions of Vatican II in Rome. He returned to Taiwan in 1963 and remained there until his death in 1996 in Taoyuan; he is buried at Hsinchu.
Of all the Jesuits who served in China, perhaps the most well known to students at SI was Fr. William Ryan, SJ. Though not an SI grad, he taught and counseled at SI between 1960 and 1989. While serving as prefect of discipline at Aurora Preparatory and as associate pastor at Sacred Heart Church, both in Yangzhou City, Fr. Ryan went on trial, charged with being a spy. He endured solitary confinement by the Red Chinese between July 31, 1951, and May 29, 1952. In a 1988 interview, published in the Winter edition of Genesis II, he spoke of his experiences in prison: “I lost track of time, forgot how long I’d been in my cell. They took away our calendars. I had nothing but that cell. Four walls, a floor and a ceiling with a 15-watt bulb way up on top. No books…. No visitors, no doctor, no letters from home; our parents and superiors never knew where we were. Just a big hole, that’s all. They wanted to break us down.” After a series of brutal interrogations, the authorities released Fr. Ryan in 1952 to Irish Province Jesuits stationed in Hong Kong.
Fr. John Clifford, SJ, also knew the reality of torture. After seven years working in Shanghai, he was arrested on June 15, 1953, in Shanghai and spent three years in prison enduring psychological torture meant to brainwash him. In his book, In the Presence of My Enemies (published in 1963 by W.W. Norton & Co.), he told of how he was tossed out of jail in 1956 by his captors who were enraged that he had not “submitted a confession nor given my captors a single fragmentary sentence of propaganda value. They freed me, even though at the last minute I refused to sign the papers they insisted were necessary. In other words, I behaved like a normal, stubborn American — and that is what saved me.”23
Another noteworthy SI missionary was Fr. John Gordon, SJ. He began his Chinese language studies in 1939 in Beijing and taught in Shanghai before being interned by the Japanese in 1942. He taught English for four years in Nanjing and then left for the Philippines in 1951 after the Communist takeover. While serving as treasurer of Xavier University in Cagayan de Oro City, he helped the impoverished communities living at the town’s garbage dump, who combed through the trash each day looking for something to use or sell. Fr. Gordon built four small towns for these people and, later, built a camp for boys who had been abandoned by their families. Assisting him in those efforts was Fr. Gregory Ahern, SJ ’44.
Also stationed in Taiwan was Fr. Philip Bourret, SJ ’29, now in residence in Los Gatos. He worked in radio and television there between 1950 and 1967, assisted from the states by his classmate Harold De Luca ’29 (who is also a generous benefactor to SI). He had 2 million listeners to his show at the peak of his success, and he later traveled for three decades offering help to churches in Third World countries to start their own religious broadcast programs.
Other prominent SI grads who served in the Far East include Fr. Edward Thylstrup, SJ ’52, who works as the English language editor for Kuangchi Program Service in Taipei, and the late Fr. Alden Stevenson, SJ ’32, an administrator in Hsinchu and editor of the Jesuit Missions magazine. After normalization of relations between China and the U.S. in the 1970s, Fr. Stevenson led the first university study group to China and made several subsequent visits over the next 25 years. He was influential in starting a number of academic exchange programs between Chinese universities and USF before his retirement in 1981. In addition, Br. Richard Devine, SJ ’52, has worked in Japan since 1959.
The job of raising funds to support these missionaries fell on the office of the California Jesuit Missionaries, headed by Fr. Ed Murphy, SJ, from 1964 until 1981, and by Fr. Theodore Taheny, SJ ’43, from 1981 until 2003. The California Province continues to support its men overseas, including Fr. David Robinson, SJ ’70, who works as a parish priest at St. Joseph Catholic Church in Benin City, Nigeria.
The SI-China connection is far from over, however. Br. Daniel Peterson, SJ, who served as a librarian at SI for 25 years and who is now the province archivist, spent several summers in the 1980s and 1990s in the She Shan Regional Seminary in Shanghai helping to catalogue and organize 30,000 books donated by schools and seminaries throughout the U.S. and Europe. Those donations were arranged by the late Fr. Ed Malatesta, SJ, who lived in community with the SI Jesuits while working at USF as the director of the Institute for Chinese-Western Cultural History (now called the Center for the Pacific Rim).24