The Jesuits

Before I write a single word about the Jesuits I met and came to admire in Pohnpei, let me refer you to the encyclopedic work that I stumbled onto last year, which gave me a hint of what Francis X. Hezel was capable of:

The Catholic Church in Micronesia

This document, well, you can get lost in it because it is such a rich and compendious story of passionate commitment, intelligence, and a faith that passeth all my understanding. I'm sure that an equally penetrating study could be done--possibly has been done--about the work of Protestant missionaries in Micronesia (they were on Pohnpei first, after all), but it was the Jesuits with whom I came into contact while I was there. Now let me back up a bit.

The Before picture

I was never actually hostile to the Roman Catholic Church, but growing up as a delicate Methodist kid in a bi-cultural town, I heard a lot of stories about the kids who went to the parochial schools or to the military academy, St. Joseph's (long since renamed Thomas More Prep). "They always vote however the priest tells them too," that kind of talk. Or how the Knights of Columbus were storing weapons in their basement to be used when the Catholics were strong enough to take over the town. God knows what kinds of stories they told about us. The deal was the most of the Catholics in Hays, Kansas, were descendants of a proud group of settlers, know as the Volga Germans, who (like their predecessors in Kansas the Mennonites) were wooed away from Russia by representatives of the Santa Fe Railroad in tireless campaign to populate "the great American desert," which is how the western two-thirds of Kansas was characterized before the Civil War. The "ROOshuns," as we called them--they spoke only a kind of fossilized German, not Russian--still spoke English with a slight accent, and "intermarriage" between Catholic and Protestant was frowned on by both sides. Enough about Hace, America! The Catholic priests I met in Pohnpei dispelled all of this nonsense once and for all.

The After picture

The rest of this page gives very brief introductions to the Jesuit missionaries that I encountered during my Peace Corps tenure in Pohnpei. They were at the top of the list when it came to persons who were committed to the long haul in helping Pohnpeians determine what kind of lives they wanted to lead in the post-war era. They were knowledgeable, resourceful, tireless, and kind. They completely turned me around on the potential of the Roman Catholic Church--yes, despite everything--to do good. Coming from a Unitarian-Universalist, I hope that carries some kind of legitimacy.

Father Joe Cavanagh was the priest in charge of the Catholic mission in Wene, Kiti, where the Peace Corps trained both the Micro 7 and Micro 8 volunteers. We were so lucky to have his dedication, sense of humor, and expertise in cross-cultural communication. He actually flew to our staging base in Escondido, California, to help orient us to life in Pohnpei. He explained that there were no beaches that we could luxuriate on. If we asked for a drink of water, would it be offered in a coconut shell? "No," he answered his own question, "more likely it would be in a whiskey bottle, but it would be a clean whiskey bottle." Cav did not wear a priest’s clothing or a clerical collar. In his crew cut and faded Hawaiian shirt, he looked more like a beach comber.

He was an inveterate ham radio operator and on certain nights he helped several of us contact our families in the States via another ham operator who could dial our family's number and connect the receiver to the radio mike. Unfortunately, he did not live very long after returning to the States, and I very much regret not tracking him down. Fran Hezel wrote a wonderful remembrance called The Passing of a Grunt.

Those of us who survived Escondido and then survived the deselection process that continued after we arrived in Wene, got to hear our second famous Jesuit, Father William McGarry. His delightful book about Pohnpei, West from Katau, was circulated in mimeographed format while I was still on Pohnpei and was later (1972) edited by David Hanlon and published by the Pohnpei Education Dept. It is sadly not listed on Amazon. When McGarry came to speak at our Wene training, we all gathered in the dining hall of the Catholic mission. McGarry was being shepherded by the late Dirk Ballendorf, a Peace Corps Volunteer who arrived in 66 or 67.

As you can read in the link, Dirk went on to a prestigious career in Micronesia; I was surprised to learn that he died at 74. All I remember from the training episode is that he got quite annoyed with me for making McGarry late to say mass at the Wene church. I had asked a few follow-up questions after McGarry’s talk and McGarry kept kindly answering my questions without any appearance of urgency. I just noticed that David Hanlon’s equally wonderful and much longer book, Upon a Stone Altar, is available in its entirety online:

McGarry had a legendary reputation for his mastery of meing, the Pohnpeian honorific language variant. I wish I could have taken a class from him, and I know that Ken and Damian will surely use some of McGarry's notes on meing --assuming there are such notes--in their next edition of the Pohnpeian-English dictionary.

At some point I realized that Cavanagh, McGarry, and Hugh Costigan, the founder of Ponape Agriculture and Trade School in Madolenimw were part of a sort of Jesuit "gang" from New York that had been assigned to take over the mission work in Pohnpei after the end of the war. I think they may have been based at Fordham University. The group is formally known as New York Province Jesuits.

I didn’t meet Father Costigan until after I was assigned to my elementary school in Saladak, Uh. At some point probably in the fall of ‘68 I showed up on the campus of PATS (Ponape Agriculture and Trade School) and was introduced to the faculty by fellow Kansan and Micro 7 Volunteer Len Schamber. Len started as an ESL teacher at Wapar but ended up spending a good deal of time at PATS and often served Irish coffee to Costigan after the communal supper. I already knew a little about Costigan's success with helping Pohnpeians build sturdier (read, typhoon-resistant) homes by making their own cinder blocks. I remember seeing a number of foundations for such houses, most of which had a few runs of bricks starting their walls. They were good places to hang laundry out to dry. Costigan was probably the closest thing to Moses that Pohnpei ever saw, when it came to practical educational and economic development. He was also, I later learned, a charismatic international fundraiser for the trade school that he founded. As a journalism major, I was by that time entertaining delusions of grandeur, so I asked Costigan if I could assist in writing the history of the Madolenihmw Housing Coop.

“No,” Father Costigan took a sip of his whiskey-laced coffee and let me down gently, “that’s a story I’ll have to write myself.” I should have tried harder to win him over. He died in 1987 without--as far as I know--writing the MHC story. There may be archives sitting on a shelf or in a drawer somewhere. Who knows? There is a nice website about PATS that is based on a commemorative booklet published on its 25th anniversary in 1990. If anyone finds a history of the housing cooperative, please let me know.

Len Schamber stayed in touch with Costigan to the bitter end, visiting him at Fordham Hospital, which was in a high-crime neighborhood. On the phone, Costigan had made Len promise to keep his cab waiting at the hospital entrance, which the cab driver refused to do. After Len entered the hospital room, Costigan’s first question was “Did you keep the cab waiting?” When Len shook his head, the dying Jesuit spent the next several minutes berating him. It must have been a touching scene. Len did make it back to Kansas in one piece, I should add.

PATS had to close a few years after Costigan retired. Father Cavanagh had taken over for a while, but a shortage of funds, among other reasons, led to the closure. At the time I was in Micronesia, PATS, in Pohnpei, and Xavier High School, in Chuuk, were the most sought-after places for kids who were looking for a high-quality secondary education. It's easy to see why.

The final character in my Jesuit lineup was Padre Higinio Berganza, the Spanish priest at the Awak mission in Uh. My Peace Corps friend Charleen Hauser had been assigned to Awak at the same time I was assigned to Saladak, which was about an hour’s walk south of her. Charleen was Catholic and introduced me to the elderly priest and his elderly assistant. Berganza had arrived in 1926 to be the first priest in Awak after the church was rebuilt following a fire. I didn't speak Spanish at the time, and Berganza's English was marginal at best. He was also considerably older than he was when the accompanying photo was taken. I'm sure his Pohnpeian was excellent, but he was a busy guy, and to tell the truth I really was more interested in visiting with Charleen.

She lived in a multi-room apartment above the mission school in what was, for Peace Corps standards, the lap of luxury. She even had a small kerosene refrigerator. It is hard to say which was the greater motivator for my visits to Awak: my affection for Charleen or my desire simply to open that little fridge to find something cold to drink.

Although this page was supposed to be only about the Jesuits that I met, I feel that I know Francis Hezel better than any of the others simply because I have read so much of his writing about Micronesia during the last several months.

I finally reached him by email to say hello and to say thanks for all he had taught me. He replied in part, "You and I wouldn’t really have known one another during your PCV stint on Pohnpei since I was in Chuuk at the time. I taught at Xavier 1963-66, and then returned to Chuuk after theology in 1969 to resume work at Xavier before moving into the MicSem [Micronesia Seminar] responsibilities full-time. In 2009 I was asked for a reflection on my Jesuit life in the islands; the result was a monograph published in Studies in Jesuit Spirituality under the title “A Life at the Edge of the World.” This is a downloadable Acrobat document of about 34 pages that describes how Hezel found his way to Micronesia and how the Church's understanding of its role in the mission field has changed since Vatican II. I particularly liked the quotation from the (Third Century Bishop) Irenaeus

"The glory of God is man fully alive."

There is a short television interview with Hezel in which he describes his recent study called Micronesians on the Move (about the migration of Micronesians to Guam, Hawaii, and the States):

Who Are These Strange People?

This page has links to several other videos, as I recall.

Cav and Bill McGarry probably in the early 70s

Cav as I remember him from Peace Corps training in Wene 1968

Father McGarry, semi-retired in the Phillipines

Father Hugh Costigan in his later years

Costigan immortalized in commemorative Micronesia postage stamps

Father Berganza and Hermano Juan, presumably in Awak

Francis X. Hezel