Religion: Rigged Suicide?

On the morning of Feb. 9, 1951, one of the best-known missionaries in China was found dead in his prison cell at Wuchow. He was Dr. William L. Wallace, 43, a Southern Baptist medical missionary. His Communist jailers, who had imprisoned him on trumped-up “spy” charges, called it suicide. When Father Mark Tennien, a Roman Catholic Maryknoll missionary and a longtime friend of Dr. Wallace’s, got out of China last November, newspaper stories from Hong Kong quoted him as confirming this version of Wallace’s death (TIME, Dec. 31).

In Manhattan last week, Father Tennien straightened out the record. It was true, he said, that Dr. Wallace, driven out of his mind by the Reds’ unending and unbelievably thorough “interrogation” sessions, might have committed suicide. The day he died, two other Catholic missionaries, imprisoned at the same place, were shown his body, hanging from the roof of his cell. Strangely, however, there was no discoloration of the face or other signs of suffocation by strangling. His body, on the other hand, was covered with bruises from beatings. Only the Communists, says Father Tennien, know how he died, whether beaten to death by his jailers or driven by his tortures to suicide. assistant curate can count on about £6 a week ($16.80).

Last week Bishop Barry, who has led the Church of England’s official recruiting campaign, arrived in the U.S. for a visit. His purposes : 1) to conduct a three-month preaching tour; 2) to see if “his church’s sister communion, the Protestant Episcopal Church of the U.S., which has a clergy shortage of its own, has any hints to offer on how to attract worthy candidates to the Christian ministry.