Protestant Damien

As a rule, Protestants forget their saints, but last week Protestants in Manhattan honored Mary Reed, a gently indomitable old lady in India who is the greatest living apostle to the lepers. The occasion was the 50th anniversary of her heading Chandag Leprosarium in the Himalaya foothills.

In 1885, during her first year in India, Missionary Reed chanced to visit a hill-country colony of 500 lepers and became interested in their plight. In 1891, on her first furlough home to the U.S., she learned she had become a leper herself. Without telling her friends, she returned to India, started work among the lepers at Chandag. Because lepers have very little strength, most leprosariums have some non-leper helpers. Chandag had none. Miss Reed preached, healed, built a church and then dormitories, nursed her lepers, organized them into a self-helping community.

Unlike Father Damien, who contracted the disease during his work at Molokai and eventually died of it, Mary Reed's leprosy disappeared after nine years, leaving her with few of the deformities or mutilations common in "burned-out" cases. Mary Reed believes her faith cured her. So do friends who had prayed for her on three continents. Now 86 and almost blind, she still teaches and preaches at Chandag.

Last week's honors for Mary Reed were part of the 34th annual meeting of the American Mission to Lepers, an interdenominational Protestant offshoot of the 67-year-old British Mission to Lepers. Together the two operate 200 colonies for 150,000 lepers in 48 countries. This year the American Mission raised $300,000 for its work. This is a new high record--but it is only $2 per leper in the church colonies, and less than 6-c- each for the five to ten million lepers in the world (1,200 in the U.S.).

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