A Prisoner of God: An Account of Ft. Havas’ Missionary Life in China as Told to Anthony Jaskot

By János Havas S. J.

János Havas, a Hungarian Jesuit priest, spent eighteen years in China as a missionary. He shared in privation and suffering with his beloved Chinese people, in order to spread the faith in Jesus Christ. He lived through the Japanese occupation and the brutal period when the godless Communists seized power. The Communists destroyed his mission located in the district of Hopei. He then became the spiritual director for the Legion of Mary at the Catholic Aurora University in Shanghai, constantly giving testimony to the Catholic faith. He was expelled from the University and later arrested and imprisoned for almost two years. Torture, brutality and solitary confinement were his fate in prison. When the Communists could not break his will, they finally expelled him from China.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: May 11, 2023
• ISBN: 9781669875420

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A PRISONER

OF GOD

An Account of Ft. Havas’ Missionary Life

in China as Told to Anthony Jaskot

János Havas S. J.

Copyright © 2023 by János Havas S. J.

© Hungarian Province of the Society of Jesus

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted

in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system,

without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Drawing of Ft. John Havas by Katalin Gyulassy

Pictures provided by the Archives of the Hungarian Province of the Society of Jesus

Rev. date: 05/11/2023

Xlibris

844-714-8691

www.Xlibris.com

531583

CONTENTS

Foreword

Preface

Introduction

1. The Beginning

2. The Japanese Occupation (1941–1945)

3. Escape from the Japanese

4. The Sown Seed Bears Fruit

5. Preaching

6. Dangerous Expedition with the Help of God

7. The Communist Takeover – with American Help

8. The Bishop’s Death and Resurrection

9. Great Faith. Fleeing from the Communist

10. The Communists’ Real Face

11. The Real Liberalization: Christianity

12. Legion of Mary

13. The Korean War

14. Crackdowns

15. The Arrest

16. Interrogation and Trial

17. Finding Peace in God

18. The Passport

19. Incurable

20. Christmas in Prison

21. Mother

22. Prison Life

23. Standing up for Truth

Appendix

Obituary of Rev. John A. Havas

In Memory of P. János (John) Havas (1908–1994)

My child, if you aspire to serve the Lord,

prepare yourself for an ordeal.

— Ecclesiastes 2:1

It is according to our vocation to travel to various places

and to live in any part of the world where there is hope

of God’s greater service and the help of souls.

— Constitution of the Society of Jesus

Prisoner_of_God_Picture_0.jpg

Fr. John A. Havas, SJ

FOREWORD

The Rev. Fr. János (John) Havas, SJ

A Much-Respected Spiritual Director of the Legion of Mary

In 1908, the Rev. Fr. János (John) Havas, SJ, was born in Budapest, Hungary. At the age of twenty-two, he joined the Society of Jesus, and on August 25, 1936, he arrived in Shanghai, China, where he gave himself a Chinese name: Hua Zhu-San (China Blesses the Trinity). Continuously and voraciously, he studied the Chinese language, philosophy, and theology, and on May 31, 1941, he was ordained a priest in St. Ignatius Church in Shanghai’s Zikawei district.

Father Havas was assigned to St. Peter Catholic Church, where he worked as a spiritual director for the Legion of Mary. All of the Catholic youth were very eager to listen to him, and a large number of them joined the Legion of Mary. After the Communists seized power in 1949, authorities in the regime learned of the spiritual work of Father Havas, and they grew to detest him. Father Havas was arrested in 1952, and after nearly two years in the number 1 detention center in Shanghai, located on South Station Road, he was banished from China.

Forced to leave the Mainland, Father Havas remained in Hong Kong for four years, then left for the United States and Canada. At the end of his life, he lived in a retirement home run by the Jesuits in the Bronx, New York. On September 9, 1994, he passed away at the age of eighty-six.

Father Havas devoted his life to the Roman Catholic Church in China. He loved the Our Lady and loved being a spiritual director to the Chinese Catholic youth in the Legion of Mary. Going back and forth to preach to the legionaries, he was always holding a prayer book, True Devotion to Mary, by St. Louis-Marie Grignion de Montfort (1673–1716).

Always smiling, Father Havas was tall and strong, and because he had a mustache that made him look just like Vladimir Lenin of Soviet Russia, we lovingly gave him the nickname Father Lenin.

Because Father Havas came from Hungary, he fully understood that Hungary’s Roman Catholic Church underwent persecution by the short-lived Communist regime in 1918–1919 after World War I. Thus, he could forecast the future of the Roman Catholic Church in China under the ruling Communist Party. He encouraged us to keep away from propaganda, and, always strengthened our faith.

The Rev. Fr. Matteo Chu Li-The, SJ

September 8 Editorial Board

PREFACE

At the end of the First World War, the provincial superior of the Hungarian Jesuits vowed that if they survived the cruelties of the Soviet Republic of 1918–19 in Hungary, after the war they would send missionaries to China. The promise was fulfilled, and in the 1930s, more than thirty Hungarian Jesuits were sent to the Far East. Among these young Jesuits was John Havas, who was born in Diósjenő in 1908, entered the Jesuits in 1930, and after his novitiate and philosophical studies in 1936 was sent to the Chinese mission. He learned the Chinese language rather well, helped by his musical ear and fine singing voice. He then studied theology in Shanghai and was ordained a priest there in 1941.

We should know the political situation in China during those years. The Manchu dynasty abdicated its imperial power in 1912, following the Wuchang uprising under Sun Yat-sen (†1925), who formed the National Party (Kuomintang, 1912). He is usually called the Father of Modern China, who accepted the cooperation of even the Communist Party. He was followed by Gen. Chiang Kai-shek (†1975), who, in a national revolution (1925–27), attacked North and Central China: Hankow, Shanghai, and Nanking. He ruled with the Kuomintang from Nanking and succeeded in unifying China (1927–36). Meanwhile, the Communists under Mao Tse-tung (†1978) were organized around the Red Army (1928), but they were defeated by the nationalists and had to undertake the Long March to Yenan in 1936, where they set up their headquarters.

China had been in continuous conflict with Japan between 1894 and 1945. In 1895, China conceded Korea and Taiwan to Japan. Then in 1931, Japan seized Manchuria in the north and in 1937 invaded China itself. The national government was forced to move from Nanking to Chung-Ching. This Sino-Japanese War was part of World War II (1937–45). After WWII and the Japanese occupation, the Kuomintang with Chiang Kai-shek dominated China, but now Mao Tse-tung, with Soviet help, expelled the Kuomintang, which moved to Taiwan and formed nationalist China with United States protection.

In 1949, Mao Tse-tung established the People’s Republic of China with a Communist government. He made a treaty with the USSR (1950) and sent troops to Korea. His dictatorial regime killed more than eight hundred thousand people. In 1950, Mao occupied and annexed Tibet. He came into ideological conflict with the USSR regarding the borders and also the leadership of world Communism. His only partner was Albania. In 1958–60, he announced the Great Leap Forward, an economic development plan which failed. In 1965, he proclaimed the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (his ideology was described in the Little Red Book), which led to many political purges.

This was the situation in which the missionaries found themselves in the 1930s. They were in the midst of the Japanese occupation, and since 1937 under Communist attacks. As a young priest, Father Havas was sent to a northern Chinese village, Chien-Chuang, in the district of Hopei. Father Havas became the soul of that missionary center, where there was a church, a residence for the priest, and a dispensary for the sick. His church was always full of people. His lifestyle was very poor, living only on millet and polenta. In his dispensary, he kept only aspirin, chinin, and penicillin. Yet he was an attractive person with a beautiful singing voice, a dramatic actor, and a very effective healer and infirmarian. He introduced the method of curing trachoma with the injection of goat milk, and he even performed surgeries (including amputations!) whenever it was necessary. He became the house doctor for the local Communist leaders.

While in 1949 the Maoists expelled most of the foreign missionaries (who then went to Hong Kong, Macao, or Taiwan), a few of them were able to remain in the mainland. Among them was Father Havas who stayed in Shanghai for three years at the Aurora University as the chaplain of university students. In the beginning, he was the spiritual leader of the northern, Mandarin-speaking students, but soon many others joined him. Besides being a spiritual father for them, he organized study groups and gave retreats for them. He openly attacked the regime, so in 1952, he was arrested, but first, he said the Te Deum in the chapel and burned his photos, notes, and personal items. He was condemned and kept in prison for almost two years, often in solitary confinement. His Jesuit brothers did not know about him, thinking that the Chinese had handed him over to the Hungarian Communists in 1953 and that he had been put in prison in Hungary.

Yet the Communists imprisoned him in China, where he almost lost his sight. He spent one year in solitary confinement, and there he learned to be alone with Jesus Christ. Finally, in 1954 he was released and expelled from his beloved China. His superiors sent him to the United States, where he taught high school German first in New York then in Rochester. Then he found his life occupation in holding retreats at different retreat houses in New Jersey and New York, mostly in Auriesville and Morristown. When he became weak and unable to walk, he was confined to a wheelchair and was transferred to the Murray-Weigel Hall Infirmary of Fordham University in the Bronx, New York, where he continued to hold retreats for numerous people. Here I had the opportunity of visiting him briefly in the early 1990s. In the eyes of the nurses, he was a holy man. Here he died on September 9, 1994, at the age of eighty-six, in the sixty-fourth year of his Jesuit life, and in the fifty-third year of his priesthood.

The story of his life in China is described in this book. He told it to one of his friends during those forty years he spent in New York, holding retreats constantly. The story is like a diary of those terrible years that he survived. Just as the love of Jesus inspired him to go the missions, it kept him alive for eighteen years under those incredible circumstances. His spiritual experiences made him an excellent director of spiritual exercises for the rest of his life. After reading his story, one is embarrassed to acknowledge how little we dare to do for our faith and love for the Lord. May this book inspire us to do more for Jesus and make us willing to make sacrifices for Him, as the missionaries did and do even today.

† Attila Miklósházy SJ

ep. emeritus Hungarorum in exteris

INTRODUCTION

It was on a warm, sunny day on August 15, 1936, the Feast Day of the Assumption of our Lady, when the steaming train, with its engine decorated by a six-foot cross covered with white carnations, waited for its boarders. They were seven Hungarian religious—all bound for the mission fields in China.

The station platform was crowded with milling, jostling, shouting, and gesticulating well-wishers; classmates, alumni, friends, and relatives had come to wish them good luck and to wave goodbye. The station master claimed it was a bigger turnout than the one that greeted the dictator Benvenuto Mussolini of Italy when his official train stopped in Budapest in that same year.

It was a festive occasion; the hearts of the boarders were full of joy and love for the world.

One of the religious was John Havas,¹ a young Jesuit seminarian, who embraced his teary and proud mother at the last moment and prophetically said, Mother, we will meet again in heaven. He would never again see her on earth, nor would he ever return to the land of his birth.

They changed engines at the border of Yugoslavia and then the train found its way to Trieste, Venice, and the Eternal City of Rome where the group stopped for two days of sightseeing.

The sun was going down on September fifth as their ship, the Conte Verde of Italian registry, pulled up anchor and put out to sea. They had left the port of Naples bound for the Orient. The liner sailed through the Suez Canal into the Red Sea, passed the tip of southern Yemen and then had to alter course and duck into the Bombay Harbor because of a raging typhoon.

Three weeks after leaving Naples, the Conte Verde docked in Shanghai. When the seminarian arrived there, only a fool or a blind man could not see the red apocalyptic horse of war riding the land of his newly adopted country.

Internally, an epic struggle for control of the nation was going on between the legitimate nationalist government headed by Chiang Kai-shek and the rebellious Communists led by MaoTse-tung.

At the same time the Japanese—who, in 1931, had occupied Manchuria without any opposition and shortly afterward had set up a puppet regime—had hoped for further territorial gains without resorting to force. But when the two opposing Chinese factions temporarily united and put up a determined resistance, the Japanese provoked a military incident on July 7, 1937, at the Marco Polo Bridge near Peking and began an all-out though still undeclared war on China. The invaders captured many major cities, especially in the northern parts, and controlled the entire seacoast of the war-ravaged nation.

These international and internal conflicts were not the Jesuit’s immediate concern. He was here on the peaceful mission of bringing the Word of God to the people.

He fell in love with China from the moment that he first landed on its shore. He fell in love with the land, the fields, the mountains, the deserts, the skies, the trees, and the animals. Most of all he fell in love with the people, these ancient, simple, open, friendly, and joyful people who, for thousands of years, from the beginning of time, worked the soil to scratch out an existence. They are the salt of the earth and, for generation after generation, stood their ground against staggering odds. They struggled to live life as best as they could.

The people survived and will survive. Storms, dangers, floods, famines, wars, and raids may temporarily drive them off their inherited lands. Nevertheless, they always return to the soil since this is their land, and they are worthy of its yield. They were the ones who slept every night, exhausted, but at peace with themselves because they had earned their daily bread. When they died, they did so with dignity.

When Father Havas said that he admired the Chinese people, he did not include the few parasites who lived off and exploited the tillers of the soil. Nor did he include those few evil men who took over the reins of the government. Since they denied the very existence of God, it was inevitable that they would deny the right to believe to those who believed that man was made in His image. The very fabric of society as well as all the foundations of the past were threatened with destruction. Oppression, suppression, and cruelty supplanted goodness and decency. The new leaders governed with no heart and with no fear of the Lord. Their rule was predicated on falsehood and the big lie—repeat it long enough and it might be believed. They were the masters of deception.

Nonetheless, for the next eighteen years of the Jesuit’s stay in China, they were to be his people, and he was hoping that his God would also be their God and would dwell among them. This was the time when he was young and innocent and the world was therefore innocent. He had answered God’s call to go forth and proclaim the Gospel to every part of the world, following in the tradition of St. Francis Xavier who, in the sixteenth century, was the first missionary to set foot on the Asian mainland.

In his small way, Father Havas was to be a shepherd to the Chinese people. A shepherd is willing to give up his life for his sheep. The time would come when he would be put to the test.

Anthony Jaskot

1

The Beginning

Upon my arrival in Shanghai, I immediately became one of the many Jesuit students from nine different countries who studied the Mandarin language. The school was directed by a Basque Jesuit Father who was an authority on the language. Twenty-seven of his Chinese teachers faced the class and with gestures and sounds taught us Mandarin. No other language was spoken.

Mandarin is a musical four-toned, monosyllabic language with no alphabet. It consists of ideograms or pictures or characters. We also learned to write them into each other’s palms. My name or character, Father Shen Fu, translated into the flower of China praises the Trinity. Thank you.

But then languages come very easily to me. Besides the Mandarin and my native Hungarian, I had mastered Latin, German, Spanish, Italian, and later French.

Incidentally, it was the same Basque Jesuit who at our graduation, two years later, admonished us to cultivate three virtues if we were to be successful in China. The first thing you must practice is patience. The second thing you must practice is patience. And the third thing is, here he paused, is also patience.

I was thankful that my first missionary assignment was in the northern province of Hopei where Mandarin was spoken because there are hundreds of dialects in the country.

Prisoner_of_God_Picture_1.jpg

The young Hungarian Jesuits in 1936, shortly after arriving in China.

Standing (left to right): István Bencze, Lajos Papilla, István Jaschkó, József Maron,

János (John) Havas, János Ácsbolt; sitting: Bishop Miklós Szarvas.

John, I want you to go to the mission field in the northern part of the country, my bishop ordered me one day in 1941.

Under normal conditions, I would have been apprenticed to another veteran missionary for a period of up to six months. Under his tutelage, I would learn my new duties and responsibilities. He would accompany me on our rounds, introduce me to the parishioners, and guide me in all other matters; but the missionary who served this area died suddenly, and I was asked to go alone after my ordination. I was thirty-three years of age. Since I was older and hopefully more mature than my classmates, the good Bishop Szarvas felt that I would be the logical candidate.

My new parish was a large territory to cover, lying north of the Yellow River in the Hopei province. The mission band consisted of thirty-nine stations, which would take from three to twelve months to visit. It was an enormous task, but I was young, strong, and healthy, and so I felt honored to be chosen. After all why else did I decide to become a Jesuit?

This is why I came in the first place.

First I had to take leave of my old merchant friend in Shanghai.

This clamorous, crowded, and polyglot city was still an open international port; the Communists had not yet taken control of China. This merchant was a worldwide export-import dealer with branch offices in Hong Kong, Formosa, Sumatra, and other parts of Asia. I was introduced to him by one of my fellow Jesuit priests, who had been assigned to the mission field before me.

John, he said, I have become very friendly with an old Jewish trader in town. He’s a kind and good man but lonely. Since, as you know, I will be leaving soon I wonder if you might occasionally drop in to see him and cheer him!

Sure, I said. He brought me to the man’s house and introduced me to an