Shock Troops

As happy as a group of college alumni back for reunion, 31 Catholic missionary priests and bishops arrived last week at a huge grey stone building overlooking the Hudson River near Ossining, N.Y. They represented some 400 Maryknoll Fathers scattered across the world, and they had traveled hard and far -- from ten countries in the Orient and Latin America -- to be at their society's decennial general chapter.

Neither the grey stone building nor its inhabitants had an air of contemplation, isolation or monasticism. The delegates laughed, quipped, swapped stories of their experiences like young returned war veterans.

Christian Adventurers. When the Holy See opens a new field, it often calls on the Maryknollers as its shock troops (the latest field: Africa, opened this year and already invaded by four Maryknoll priests). Asia, and particularly China, where the men of Maryknoll have preached, doctored and taught, has been their No. 1 field. There, deep in the Japanese war zone, Maryknoll missionaries stuck to their posts, filled the files of their order (only 35 years old last April) with accounts of adventure and heroism. Many wound up in Japanese prison camps.

It was one of the erstwhile Japanese prisoners that the Maryknollers chose last week as their new superior general. He is the Most Rev. Raymond A. Lane, 52, since 1940 Bishop of Fushun, Manchuria. A slender, freckled man with thinning red hair, he was born in Lawrence, Mass., turned down a chance for West Point, and turned away from business (with the Liggett drug chain) to become a priest.

During the next ten years, the Maryknollers will concentrate hardest on Christianizing Japan. Because defeat discredited Buddhism and Shintoism, the Japanese are turning to Christianity, "the religion of the victors." But the Japanese have other reasons with which the Maryknoll missionaries sympathize and on which they intend to capitalize. Explained one of them last week: "The Japanese think now that the only real danger to their progress toward becoming a stable power is Communism, and they know that the Catholic Church is the implacable enemy of Communism."

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