Shunned

In the small chapel overlooking one of the waterways that run like ribbons into the Pearl Delta in southern China, someone is playing a one-finger version of "Jingle Bells" on the organ. It's a liturgical prelude, and those already gathered for Mass sing the Chinese lyrics with gusto. The others scurry up the hill toward the chapel. Or, to be more accurate, they limp and shuffle, the lame leading the blind. One man hauls himself along on a three-wheeled skateboard, propelling himself with his one leg as his opposite hand uses a flat, iron contraption as a cane. He finally hoists himself up the last three steps into the chapel. Inside, the organist isn't using one finger after all: he has no fingers. He strikes the keys with a chop-stick held between two stumps where his fingers used to be.

This place is known as Tian Muhn, "Door of Heaven." It consists of a cluster of brick huts in a mountainous jungle clearing above the village of Ngai Sai. The people here--to use the common biblical term--are lepers.

One's breath catches as they congregate, some with stumps of limbs, others with noses partly eaten away, for the sheer gospel weight and breadth of it. "If you want to, you can cure me" (Mark 1:40).

Leprosy, of course, is now curable, thanks to modern medicine and hygiene; it even has a modern name: Hansen's disease. And those afflicted are no longer identified by their illness ("lepers"), but are called "patients"--or, in this village, since it is more of a community than a clinic--"friends."

Only 5 percent of the Chinese population is susceptible to Hansen's disease, and those who contract it can be completely cured if medical treatment is provided in time. For the rest, Hansen's can be contained by medication and its contagion controlled. If the bacterium that causes Hansen's does manage to reach the nerve sheath, however, it can damage the nerve endings and lead to deformity.

For most of the people in Tian Muhn, the medical miracle did not arrive in time. They have been here since before the day in August 1953 when the founder of the leprosarium, Maryknoll Father Joseph Sweeney, was expelled by the forces of the cultural revolution. The care of the five hundred patients was then left to government bureaucrats, the cross in the tiny cemetery was knocked down. The scriptural quotes on the chapel walls were painted over, and the people in the village below continued to shun the patients.

What did these outcasts do for spiritual sustenance during the long decades the rest of their country was being revolutionized? They shuffled, padded, and limped to the chapel each day to recite the rosary and sing hymns. They continued this practice for two decades, until the ban on Christianity was lifted. That is why, just now at Mass, as the organist lifts his chopstick from the keys and rises to receive Communion, the voices continue singing without hesitation. The chapel resounds with full-throated hymns. The joy inside this simple structure, filled with wasting bodies, rings to the rafters.

Life is different now in important respects. The number of patients here has shrunk to about 120. Since 1982, a priest of the officially registered church has come to the chapel every other month from a neighboring town to say Mass. Three Sisters of Charity of St. Anne, a Spanish order, arrived in the spring of 2002. A small clinic has been set up, white and dazzling in the midst of the jungle thickness. Special shoes promote the healing of foot ulcers. The patients receive small government pensions, which they supplement by growing garden produce and raising chickens. In the cemetery, which is down a path pressed in by flowering bushes, banana, and mango trees, a cross has once again been erected. It is housed in a pagoda designed by one of the patients. Families still tend not to visit (the stigma remains), but visitors who do come are met with leathery faces full of smiles.

And what of Father Joe Sweeney, after he and his religion were sent packing? After receiving the Damian-Dutton Award in 1954 for his work with persons with leprosy, Sweeney worked at a leprosarium in South Korea, where he died in 1966. Recently, one of the new sisters asked a patient what he remembered about Fr. Sweeney. Did he remember the good care he'd received, the Christian teaching, the sacraments? "He bought us food that we liked," was the patient's reply. "And he ate with us."

"He ate with us." If there is a place where the gospel has been more literally and vividly lived than Tian Muhn, I'd like to know it.

Mary Frances Coady is the author of With Bound Hands: A Jesuit in Nazi Germany (Loyola Press).

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