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!
For almost 500 years, the world sent priests to America. In the early part of the 20th century, however, America began sending priests to the world. One of the first of those priests was Bishop Francis Xavier Ford, M.M.
Brooklyn born and raised, Ford was the first man to enroll in the Maryknoll seminary, founded in 1912 to support the work of the also newly founded Catholic Foreign Mission Society of America. Five years later, Ford became the first Maryknoll seminarian to graduate and was ordained to the priesthood on December 5, 1917.
Early the following year, Father Ford headed to China, arriving in October 1918 with three other Maryknoll missionaries, including Mary-knoll co-founder Father Thomas Frederick Price. Ford then proceeded to the southern province of Canton (now Guangdong), where he established two Catholic missions, one in the north and one in the south.
Consecrated a bishop in 1935, Ford’s evangelization efforts included building schools and churches, establishing the first convent of Mary-knoll sisters in the region, and cultivating priestly vocations among the native Chinese. Within 20 years, the number of Chinese Catholics in the region had grown from fewer than 9,000 to more than 20,000. Throughout World War II, Ford provided shelter and food to countless refugees as well as to Allied and Chinese troops combating the occupying Japanese.
All that was forgotten, however, when the Communists came to power.
In 1950, Mao’s men put Ford and his secretary, Sister Joan Marie Ryan, M.M., under house arrest. The following spring, soldiers took Ford from his home and marched him through the villages where he’d served, organizing mobs to torture and beat him along the way. They finally led Ford back to a prison in Guangdong, where he died on February 21, 1952.
