By Gee-Gee O. Torres

The great struggle to end anti-personnel landmines continues. Up to now, in spite of the campaign of Princess Diana, Pax Christi and a great number of Christian and to there group throughout the world, some countries continue to make landmines: Pakistan, India, USA, China. Below is an account of our Assistant Editor’s visit to Cambodia where she visited our Filipino missionaries and was faced with the stark reality of the effects of the landmines. (Ed.)

Before I went to Cambodia last year to visit our Filipino missionaries I had to finish laying out our March-April 2000 issue. I also had to edit the articles which I enjoyed doing, except for one: the articles on landmines. I quivered as I read the lines describing how landmines tore off the limbs of the victims. So I went to Cambodia not only with my unpleasant memory of the movie, The Killing Fields, but also with the uncertainty of my safety. I could step on a landmine by chance and lose my leg or... my life. Was I ready to take this risk? I had to make a decision. I decided to go.

By Katie Donovan

Father Aedan McGrath runs the Incola missionary program in Manila. Here he talks to Katie Donovan about his life of adventure: among other things he protected 1,500 women from rape and slaughter by Japanese soldiers in 1939, and spent three years in solitary confinement in a Chinese jail.

China

“Mao gave us a big compliment, he said the Church was public enemy number one.” Father Aedan McGrath, originally a Dubliner from Drumcondra, recalls being put in prison because of his missionary work as a Columban Father in China: “I was arrested on the 7th of September 1951. I was put in a tiny cell, like a dog box. It was solidarity confinement for three years. There was no table, chair or bed. I could lie on the floor. It wasn’t like Mountjoy, nor one of these prisons that like first-class hotels. I was never allowed to close my eyes, talk or sneeze. All around me people were going mad. They did not have their faith.”

One of the great missionaries of the century was James Walsh, the Maryknoll Bishop who spent many long years in prison in China. His great love for the poor and the marginalized of the world came to the surface in a moment of illumination which he describes here. Though these words were written long before the Vatican Council, they anticipated its spirit and have a power that we can feel even today.

I saw him in the ricefield. He stopped working as I approached and leaned on his hoe. The sweat of a hot day under the South China sun glistened on his brow. His coolie suit of blue denim was covered with dust, and the end of his frayed trousers disclosed a clumsy pair of stub-toed bare feet. He was a big boy for his age, but there was no comeliness in him twice. He was a clodhopper.

By Sr. Evangeline Canag, FSP

I am sending you...

From far away Rome, I heard John Paul II’s impassioned commissioning of the young people during the 10th World Youth Day in Manila: “To each one of you Christ says: “I am sending you....’ These words are addresses to you. The Church addresses them to all young people around the world today, though they are being addressed especially of the Philippines and to the young people of China, of Japan, Korea and Vietnam....”