Sister Joan Marie Ryan, 38, bedraggled and ill with pleurisy, was routed from her prison bed by her Communist guards one day last week and taken to see a grave on the outskirts of Canton, China. Over the grassless mound rose a small stone slab engraved with three Chinese characters. At a glance, the nun, veteran of 13 years in the China missions, transliterated: FORD. At the graveside she was forced to sign a statement that the man ostensibly buried there had died "of old age and illness." Packed off the next day to Hong Kong and freedom, Sister Joan Marie told of the end of 60-year-old Francis Xavier Ford of the Maryknoll Society, first American Roman Catholic bishop and fourth American civilian known to have died in the prisons of Red China.
The Lord's Doorstep. As the bishop's secretary in Kwangtung, Sister Joan Marie was placed under house arrest with Ford when the Reds brought trumped-up charges of espionage against him in December of 1950. Though never tried, he was taken from his home four months later and publicly paraded, beaten and degraded in some of the cities in which he had done mission work since 1918.
In one town the mob which had gathered to beat him with sticks and stones became so fierce that Bishop Ford's Communist guards fled in terror. Though knocked to the ground again & again, Bishop Ford did his best to walk calmly through the streets till the guards returned. In another town his neck was bound with a wet rope which almost choked him as it dried and shrank. Another rope was made to trail from under his gown like a tail. To humiliate them both, the Reds once forced him to undress before Sister Joan Marie. She caught a glimpse of Bishop Ford for the last time in February of this year, the month the Reds now say he died. His once dark hair was completely white, his body so emaciated that another prisoner was carrying him "like a sack of potatoes."
Bishop Ford had neither courted martyrdom nor shirked it. On first arriving in China, he uttered this prayer: "Lord, make us the doorstep by which the multitudes may come to worship Thee, and if ... we are ground underfoot and spat upon and worn out, at least we ... shall have become the King's Highway in pathless China." In 20 years Francis Ford increased his flock from 9,000 to 20,000, built schools, hostels and churches. When World War II came, he stuck by his post, aiding Chinese guerrillas, helping downed Allied airmen escape, relieving war refugees in distress.
First for Maryknoll. A doorstep in China, Bishop Ford was a door opener and pace setter for his order, the Maryknoll Society, which now numbers 2,337 fathers and sisters. He was the first student to enroll at Maryknoll when it was founded 40 years ago. Ordained a priest in 1917, he was one of the first four missioners Maryknoll sent to China the following year. He founded the Maryknoll Seminary for Chinese Boys and played a key part in organizing the first overseas convent for Maryknoll sisters. His diocese would have been the first Maryknoll territory to be turned over to the native clergy. When his death was revealed last week, it followed the pattern of his life; he was Maryknoll's first martyr to the Chinese Reds.