I don't feel inclined to get off the earth just because some people dislike my religion. Internment and death are simply the normal risks that are inherent in our state of life, a small price to pay for carrying out our duty—in our particular case a privilege because it would associate us a little more intimately in the cross of Christ.
So wrote Roman Catholic Bishop James Edward Walsh from China to his superiors in the U.S. in 1956 when the Chinese Communists offered to repatriate him. Last week, after a two-day trial by an "Intermediate People's Court" in Shanghai, 68-year-old Bishop Walsh, arrested two years ago, was sentenced to 20 years for espionage and conspiracy.
Hat on the Ground. "If love is a crime, then he is guilty," said Msgr. John F. Donovan, vicar-general of the Maryknoll Fathers last week, looking back over Bishop Walsh's long career. Maryland-born Jimmy Walsh had been one of the six original students at Maryknoll Seminary for missionaries in Ossining, N.Y., and in 1918 the young priest became a member of the first Maryknoll group of four missionary priests to be sent to China. In 1927, when the mission became a vicariate, he became its first bishop. Bishop Walsh returned to the U.S. in 1936 to serve as superior-general of the Maryknoll Fathers. Cardinal Spellman sent him back to China again in 1948 as executive secretary of the Catholic Central Bureau, coordinating all missionary, cultural, welfare and educational activities of the church in China.
When the Communists took over eleven years ago. Bishop Walsh fell under constant surveillance and expected arrest momentarily. But it did not come. Once, when he was staying with a group of Chinese priests, the police arrived to arrest them. Bishop Walsh, assuming that he was included, packed his bag and went out to join the others. When the police turned him back, according to a colleague. Bishop Walsh was so angry that he threw his hat on the ground and jumped on it. In 1955, the Communists offered to repatriate him along with 21 other Americans, but James E. Walsh refused.
Gymnastics at Dawn. Along with Bishop Walsh, 13 Chinese priests were sentenced in Shanghai to terms from five to 25 years. And there was one life sentence—for Bishop Ignatius Kung Ping-mei of Soochow. Slender, smiling Kung Ping-mei, 59, has all the qualifications to make himself hated by the Reds. Born to a wealthy Roman Catholic family in a small town near Shanghai, he studied for the priesthood in Shanghai's French Jesuit College at Zikawei, where he learned to speak perfect French and imperfect English and to understand Westerners. Father Kung specialized in education, showed notable skill as director of Shanghai's Song Hong School and later St. Louis College. In 1949, as the Communists took power, he was made Bishop of Soochow.
From the beginning, Bishop Kung knew what was in store for Chinese Christians, and that compromise was useless. But he was not arrested until 1955. The charges: 1) opposing the Communist plan to set up a schismatic Catholicism free of Vatican control, 2) opposing land reform and the Chinese assault on Korea and 3) protecting "counter-revolutionaries."