Rev. Harold Rigney SVD, (center) in Hong Kong days after he was released from a Chinese communist prison, flanked Rev. Heinrich Streithorst SVD (right) and Bp. Vitus Chang SVD (left), September 1955.
1 media/Rigney post imprisonment_thumb.jpg 2020-09-01T10:28:57-07:00 Society of the Divine Word Chicago Province Archives 6cf8a3cefe11c9d4c533bd04865769f3cf7d3ec9 37706 5 Rev. Harold Rigney SVD, (center) in Hong Kong days after he was released from a Chinese communist prison, flanked Rev. Heinrich Streithorst SVD (right) and Bp. Vitus Chang SVD (left), September 1955. plain 2020-10-01T08:46:54-07:00 Personnel files collection on Reverend Harold Rigney, SVD 20200826 112334 Society of the Divine Word Chicago Province Archives 6cf8a3cefe11c9d4c533bd04865769f3cf7d3ec9This page is referenced by:
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First American-born Divine Word Missionaries ordained in China
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Clifford King and Robert Clark had left Techny for the Society’s missions in Shandong in 1919
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10/20/1920
Just four years after founding the Society of the Divine Word in 1875, St. Arnold Janssen sent his first two foreign missionaries to China; one of them, Rev. Josef Freinademetz, was eventually canonized for his work there. And so it was that in October 1919 at St. Mary’s Mission House in Techny, IL, the first two American SVD missionaries were also sent to China. Clifford King and Robert Clark, who had yet to be ordained, were chosen to support the rural missions in Southern Shandong Province left understaffed in the aftermath of World War I.
On October 1920 the pair were ordained as the first American-born SVD priests, and by 1922 both Clark and King were operating in the SVD’s newly-established missions in Henan Province, but after Fr. Clark’s untimely death in 1923, Fr. King remained as the sole American SVD missionary in China.
Eight years later, after Fr. King had moved on to work in Shandong, Henan had taken on a more American disposition. Techny priests such as Peter Heier, Theodore Baumann, George Foffel, and Thomas Megan had been assigned to the missions there, but quickly found themselves thrust into the middle of a multi-sided conflict between the Chinese Nationalist forces, the Chinese Communist forces, and the Japanese.
Like Fr. King before him, Fr. Thomas Megan became a central American figure for the SVD’s China missions. Appointed prefect apostolic of Xinxiang, Henan in 1936, he carefully navigated the difficult position of American mission priest and Catholic Church administrator during the Second Sino-Japanese War. He finally left China in 1947, as Fr. King had in 1940, because it had simply been too strenuous and too dangerous an experience. While both planned to return, neither man would continue their work in China due to the country’s political situation.
The most significant and prestigious of the SVD’s Chinese missions was its takeover of Fu Jen Catholic University in Beijing. Founded by the American Benedictine Congregation in 1925, the effects of the Great Depression led to the order’s inability to fund the school. Pope Pius XI approached the Society of the Divine Word to assume responsibility for Fu Jen, and his proposal was accepted on February 13, 1933. The American SVD would take a leading role.
The university’s first rector was Rev. Joseph Murphy SVD, a member of Techny’s first ordination class of 1921. Fr. Murphy’s poor health was a concern from the outset, and those fears bore out when he died in 1935 after a prolonged illness. The next rector, German-born Rev. Rudolf Rahmann SVD, was able to keep the university open through both the Sino-Japanese War and World War II through careful negotiations with the Japanese.
After the war, in 1946, the SVD Generalate saw it fit to assign another American as rector: Rev. Harold Rigney SVD. Rigney would go on to be one of the best-known SVDs of the 20th century, largely because of what transpired during his tenure at Fu Jen. As Chinese Communist forces advanced closer to Beijing, pressure on the university and its staff increased. Finally, on January 31, 1949 the communists took the city, and Fu Jen became a target: it was a foreign-run religious school, anathema to the city’s new rulers.
Rigney himself became a target as well, and as the relationship between the communist government and the university further degraded, the rector ensured that American and German SVDs at Fu Jen escaped China. On July 15, 1951, he was arrested on espionage charges and summarily imprisoned. For the next four years, Fr. Rigney would endure all manner of mental and physical torture. Due to pressure from the Society and the US government, he was released on September 16, 1955. During his recuperation he wrote of his experiences in China in Four Years in a Red Hell, published in 1956.
For the remainder of his life, Fr. Rigney would bear the mental and physical scars of his internment. He lectured and wrote on the threat of communism while continuing both his missionary and paleontological work, and even visited the new Fu Jen after the school was re-established in Tiapei, Taiwan in 1961.
