Hong Kong had 1,100 baptisms at Easter, of whom our sisters prepared 458. —Sister Rosalia
Hong Kong
Ninety-six adult baptisms this morning at the mission church. In about three days some 40 children and babies will follow their parents into the Church . . . —Sister Margaret Rose
Kowak, Tanganyika, Africa
Our first group of new Catholics was formed this morning as 24 received the sacrament of baptism. —Sister Rita Marie
Miaoli, Formosa Six of our big boys baptized today. —Sister Jarte Dolores
Malabon, Philippines
Such reports, and hundreds of others, flow every week into an uncarpeted, buff-walled office overlooking the Hudson River, 32 miles north of the George Washington Bridge. At her plain desk a kindly looking woman with china-blue eyes and a no-nonsense way of handling paperwork sifts the reports, ponders, scribbles notations. On her decisions depends the deployment of a worldwide spiritual army. Her title is appropriate to the task: she is Mother General Mary Columba, 63, of the Maryknoll Sisters of St. Dominic, head of the U.S.'s biggest, most active Roman Catholic women's missionary order. She is also a symbol of a remarkable 20th century fact: monastic orders are booming, especially in the U.S.
Fascinating Marriage. Mother Mary Columba's army stretches from Peru to the Caroline Islands in the western Pacific, from Korea to Manhattan's Chinatown. Among her 1,127 sisters are eleven physicians, 118 trained nurses, 330 teachers (with a heavy sprinkling of Ph.D.s) as well as social workers, pharmacists, stenographers, cooks. They teach school in an abandoned Navy Quonset hut on Palau, and in a fine, modern, brick building in Lima, Peru. On Africa's Gold Coast they treat patients who are brought to them through the jungle on homemade stretchers, and in San Francisco they give psychiatric advice to troubled Negroes and Chinese. The yearly illustrated bulletin that reports the departure of a new detail of missionary sisters (last year's headline: FIFTY MORE IN FIFTY-FOUR) usually carries the photographs of young, remarkably handsome girls smiling under their black, pointed headdress.
The Maryknoll sisters* know how to drive jeeps (and repair them), how to administer hypodermics and do major surgery, how to teach Christian doctrine—and how to be gay. When they return from the missions to the mother house on the Hudson, they are received with laughter and merry chatter. And on the feast day of St. Teresa of Avila, Oct. 15, they celebrate by adding to their far from ascetic meals a special ice-cream soda.