Missions, China, Catholic Church 

As a child, Bishop Walsh was inspired by the patron saint of missionaries, Francis Xavier. In 1912 he became on of the first six students to enroll in the Maryknoll Society, a newly founded order devoted to training foreign missionaries. His unflagging faith, his selfless and heroic devotion, enabled him to help found the first American Catholic mission in China. During his years there, schools and orphanages, clinics and chapels, seminaries and hospitals were established under his guidance. In 1936, he returned to the United States to become superior-general of the Order, but after serving ten years in that office, he went back once again to his beloved China.

In 1958 Bishop Walsh, called by his many thousands of converts "the Pillar of Truth in China," was accused by the Communists of being an imperialist spy and condemned at a trial he was not permitted to attend. Even though he had known arrest was inevitable, he chose to remain in China rather than abandon the people to whom he had brought Catholicism in the face of wars and famines, disease and suffering. In a crowded courtroom in Shanghai he was sentenced to twenty years in a Communist prison.

Bishop Walsh of Maryknoll, the first biography of a great man and missionary, tells one of the most moving religious stories of our time. The faith with which Bishop Walsh was imbued and which he gave to the Chinese enabled them to endure some of the worst persecution suffered in the history of Christianity. His bravery and the selflessness of the Maryknoll missionaries have, despite the efforts of the Communists, brought the highest esteem to the Church in China that it has received at any time in history.

Taken from the inside flaps.