"Field Found!" Establishing the Maryknoll Mission Enterprise in the United States and China, 1918-1928

"FIELD FOUND!" ESTABLISHING THE MARYKNOLL MISSION ENTERPRISE IN THE UNITED STATES AND CHINA, 1918-1928 BY Paul R. Rivera* After an exhausting transcontinental and trans-Pacific journey of three and one-half months, the first group of American Catholic missionaries to China reached the French Catholic mission station at Yeungkong (Yangjiang) in Kwangtung (Guangdong) province on December 21, 1918 (see map).1 The four American priests were members of the Catholic Foreign Mission Society of America or Maryknoll, and their journey marked the beginning of the American Catholic mission enterprise in China. The Maryknoll newcomers soon were joined by contingents of priests, Sisters, and Brothers from fifteen American Catholic mission organizations including the Passionists, the Vincentians , the Franciscans, and the Sisters of Charity. While never approaching the numbers ofAmerican Protestant missionaries in China, the total ofAmerican Catholic missioners reached 240 in 1928 and 562 in 1946. The Maryknollers' tenure in China spanned the tumultuous years of the Nationalist Revolution of 1925-1927, the Nanking Decade, the SinoJapanese War, and the civil war between the Nationalists and the Communists . Soon after the establishment of the People's Republic in 1949, *Dr. Rivera is adjunct professor of history in Florida Gulf Coast University and Edison Community College in Fort Myers, Florida. This essay is based on research conducted at the Maryknoll Mission Archives in Ossining, New York, the Mullen Library of the Catholic University of America, and the National Archives in College Park, Maryland. The author is grateful for the guidance of Ka-che Yip and Warren I. Cohen ofthe University of Maryland Baltimore County and John Wltek, S.J., of Georgetown University, and the assistance of Ellen Pierce and Charles Huegelmeyer of the Maryknoll Mission Archives and Jean-Paul Wiest of the Center for Mission Research and Study. 'Yeungkong is the Chinese Postal Atlas place name for the city that is transcribed as Yang-chiang in Wade-Giles and Yangjiang in Pinyin. During the 1920's Maryknoll diaries and correspondence and Western newspapers and periodicals used the Chinese Postal Atlas system for place names and the Wade-Giles system for names of individual Chinese. To remain faithful to my primary sources, I have used the Maryknoll spelling for the Society 's mission stations and for place names in China. Pinyin transcriptions for place names are indicated in parentheses the initial time the term is used. 477 ó Maryknoll\in Kayj :r"'"8'h'"««•«¦»"I ti KONCHOO« VlCMtIATC ACSIbEHT MISSIONEN PAILWAY i B KONGMOO^ VlCARIATE Kongmoon i» an overnight trip by tteamer from Hongkong. Oa the above map the Vicariate it defined by ? heavy black line. The Kongmoon Vicariate in the 1920's. Source:"Kongmoon Vicariate," General Report, MFBA Kongmoon Reports, 1931. BY PAUL R. RIVERA479 Maryknoll missioners left China, although Bishop James E. Walsh, one of the original group sent to Yeungkong in 1918, chose to remain in Shanghai. Arrested and tried in 1958, Walsh was sentenced to twenty years imprisonment for espionage and conspiracy. Upon his release in June of 1970, Walsh left China and brought to a close this chapter in United States-China relations.2 While American Catholics had displayed limited interest in the foreign missions prior to 1900, American Protestant missionaries had long been active in bringing Christianity to China. Banned from evangelizing in China until 1844, Western Protestant and European Catholic mission societies took advantage of the Sino-French treaties of the 1860s to launch an invasion of the cities and countryside of imperial China. Within thirty years, Western missionaries had established mission stations in all the provinces of imperial China except Hunan, and by 1918, 94 percent of the 1,704 counties of the Republic of China reported Christian missionary activity.3 The Protestant presence in China was part of the interrelated system of evangelistic activities, charitable and humanitarian efforts, property and facilities, financial resources, and administrative infrastructure—called "the missionary enterprise" by John Fairbank—which emerged from the endeavors of nineteenth-century American Protestant mission groups to spread Christianity to Asia, the Near East, and Africa. World-wide in scope, the Protestant mission enterprise , according to Fairbank, "became institutionalized as big business ," and mission Boards constituted "the first large-scale transnational corporations."4 To support...