:DOUGLAS HYDE'S 5 E':

COLUMN
Another 'Red Week'
ATAT Dalgan Park, the Columban seminary at Navan, in Ireland, last. week we had another "Red Week". Last year's was almost certainly the first ever to be organised by a Catholic missionary society.
On hDrh occasions I conducted an intensive course in Communism, with particular reference to the missions. which was attended by priests on leave from the missions and others who were just about to leave for them.
Average attendance at the lectures this year was 50-60. This was despite the fact that there were three long sessions each day for four successive days and the course followed immediately after the annual retreat.
Present were Columban Fathers from Japan. Korea. the Philippines, Fiji. Peru and. of course, from the China missions of preCommunist days. I had met many of them in action and visited the majority of their missions at one time or another.
Not isolated
FOR someone who, like myself, spends much of his time cornmenting on world affairs. this was a wonderful opportunity for getting up to date with people and places. The mother house of a Catholic foreign missionary society provides unique opportunities for putting one's finger on the world's pulse.
Dalgan Park is in the very heart of rural Ireland. It is a wholly delightful. remote little werld of its own in what some would regard as a country somewhat outside the mainstream of world events.
Yet people from every corner of the earth are to be found there at any time. Nowhere does the world seem smaller nor the faraway places nearer at band.
Among those with whom t had stayed in the past was Fr. Brian Geraghty. director of the Columban Fathers' missions in Korea. The snowball of converts to the Faith which I found there when I visited Korea in 1954 grows and grows, he told roe.
Bishop Harold Henry. of the Kwangju Prefecture, had received 12.000 converts — approximately the annual total for Britain— between January and Easter of this year. Total for South Korea as a whole (population 22,000.000 as compared to our 48.000.0001 is likely to be in the region of 60.000.
In action
READERS of this column will, no doubt, remember Fr. Philip Crosbie who, as a prisoner of the Communists. was on the horrific "death march" to the Yalu River, along with Bishop Thomas Quinlan.
Fr. Crosbic came to slay with me shortly after he had been released from his three years' captivity. Those years had. as one might expect, left him unsettled and full of a nervous, restless energy. Now, Fr, Brian tells me. he it doing great things back in the parish where he was captured, close as ever to the borders of the Communist empire. His part of the country has not yet reached quite the same spectacular flow of cons;erts as elsewhere, although it is rapidly building up. Even so he had 500 brand-new converts at his Easter Mass this year.
We shall have good reason to feel that the re-conversion of Britain is at hand when we have conversions on the Same Seale.
Frightening
THE Faith is spreading in Korea
with quite astonishing speed. But Communism, despoe the bitterly-fought war of a few years ago, is spreading too. It is the opinion of missionaries that there are more Communists in South Korea today than there were before the Korea war. This is an almost frightening reminder of how short is the public memory and how powerful a force is the influence of Communism.
The missionaries also believe that there are almost certainly more Communists in "free" South Korea than in the Communist North.
Many of the Koreans are sadly disillusioned. A f ter defending Korea in the cause of world freedom they expected a better life. Instead, it is worse today for the ordinary folk than it was under the Japanese ocouPation.
Corruption, too, is widespread among the official class and the public are heartily sick of it just as were the Chinese peasants by the time that the Chiang Kai Shek administration collapsed. The promise to end corruption is one of the most attractive baits the Communists all over Asia can put before the people.
There are four main groups of disgruntled peopl e: the war veterans; the refugees. tens of thousands of whom have still not been rehabilitated; the war orphans who have now reached Teddy-boy age and who have only survived by living on their wits and stopping at nothing; and the small -land owners who cannot possibly make ends meet.
Side by side with this growing discontent goes a positive propaganda, originating with the Communists, that life is better in the Red North than in the South.
"When the Communists invaded the country in 1950 there was no real fifth column, no acts of sabotage to aid them." say the missionaries. "Not one bridge was blown to cut off the retreat of the Southern forces. But if they invaded again today ne are quite sure that there would he this time."
Mercifully, having burned their fingers once it is doubtful whether the Communists would run the risk of doing it again. Meanwhile the conversion of Korea to the Faith. which might be sweeping the whole country at this morment is limited by the 'chronic shortage of missionary priests.