NOTE: Enjoy this excerpt from The American Daily Reader, by CatholicVote president Brian Burch and Emily Stimpson Chapman. To order the complete volume, visit the CatholicVote store today!
On July 10, 1970, a frail, white-haired American walked across the Lo Wu Bridge, leaving Communist China behind. When he arrived at Hong Kong’s border, he identified himself as Bishop James Edward Walsh, a Maryknoll missionary, held captive for 12 years in a Chinese prison.
Bishop Walsh first arrived in China 52 years earlier, in 1918. He was a newly ordained priest then, the second for the Maryknoll order and one of its first four to arrive in China. Between 1918 and 1927, Father Walsh ran the Maryknoll mission in Yeungkong (now Yangjiang). From 1919 on, he also served as superior of the Maryknoll Mission in China, and in 1927, he was ordained bishop of the Diocese of Kongmoon (now Jiangmen).
Bishop Walsh remained in China until 1936, when his order elected him its second superior general. At the end of his term in 1948, the Vatican requested Walsh return to China to head up the Catholic Central Bureau in Shanghai and coordinate the Church’s missionary work throughout the country. A year later, the communists came to power.
In their quest to purge China of foreign and Christian influences, the government demanded that foreign clergy leave. Walsh, however, refused to go, telling his order, “To put up with a little inconvenience at my age is nothing. Besides, I am sick and tired of being pushed around on account of my religion.”
In 1958, after nine years of sparring with Walsh, the Red Army finally came for him. For the next 12 years, they held him captive. In all those years, they allowed him one visitor, one time—his brother in 1960. They permitted no other contact with the outside world. Then, in 1970, without warning, the 79-year-old priest was taken to the Lo Wu Bridge and released.
Walsh spent the last 11 years of his life at the Maryknoll Seminary in New York. So great was his love for the Chinese people that not once did he speak an ill word of his captors. He died on July 29, 1981.
