Modern Martyr

Roman Catholics and Southern Baptists are not always close friends. But in the Chinese city of Wuchow, Dr. William L. Wallace, Baptist medical missionary and superintendent of Wuchow's Stout Memorial Hospital, was for 15 years on the best of terms with the Maryknoll priests and sisters whose malaria, skin ulcers and other illnesses he treated. Even during the war years, Dr. Wallace stayed in China and kept on with his work, which Maryknoll's Father Thomas Brack last week called "a vocation of sacrifice and love."

Under China's new conquerors, calm, lanky Dr. Wallace, a 42-year-old native of Knoxville, Tenn., continued his work in Wuchow despite the hindrance of the Chinese Communists. His popularity with the Chinese of the Wuchow area was his undoing; Communist propaganda about the wicked Americans could not stand up against his living example.

About 3 a.m. last Dec. 19, Communist soldiers knocked at the hospital gate and claimed to have a sick man who needed attention. When the gate opened, they rushed into the grounds, surrounded Dr. Wallace's house, awakened him and searched his quarters. They "found" a pistol under his mattress. Dr. Wallace said he had never had a gun; his servant swore that it had not been in the room before the Communists came. But the Reds took him away to prison in his pajamas, tried to get him to sign a confession. They called a "denunciation meeting," but not one Chinese came forward to condemn him. The Reds then arrested six members of the hospital staff as "reactionary pro-Americans." None of them has been heard from since. Dr. Wallace was paraded through Wuchow and the surrounding countryside carrying a derisive placard, then returned to Wuchow jail when he appeared to be in a state of collapse.

Last week the U.S. State Department announced that Dr. Wallace had died in prison on Feb. 10. To the New York Times, Catholic Father Brack wrote a letter of tribute to his Baptist friend:

"He was the heart of the Stout Memorial Hospital, interesting himself in every patient, going untiringly from operating room to bedside in a never-ending round of charity . . . The only possible sentence the Communists could have passed on him was that he went about doing good. The Maryknoll Fathers of the Wuchow Diocese mourn the loss of Dr. Wallace, whose friendship they esteemed . . . He will be mourned by thousands of Chinese ..."

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The State Department last week announced that "many American missionaries" are in jail "at various places" in Communist China, but refused to give further facts or figures for fear of jeopardizing its sources of information.

Two Maryknoll leaders in Wuchow were arrested about the same time as Dr. Wallace. In Hong Kong last week, the Communist newspaper Ta Kung Pao reported the arrest of 19 people in Tientsin as spies "under the camouflage of the Catholic Church."

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