Parish: 28 Islands

Missionary William Eugene Rively had been at sea three days in his outrigger canoe with its crew of five Caroline Islanders. They were a bare 13 miles from their destination, at 5 p.m. of a beautiful day, when the typhoon struck.

It broke upon the frail 25-ft. craft with howling wind, pelting rain, and huge, smashing waves. Missionary Rively (rhymes with lively) and his men hung on and bailed and prayed. For three days they ran before the storm, half the time without food. By the time they reached Truk, they had spent twelve days at sea.

Father Vincent Kennally, S.J., superior of the Caroline and Marshall Islands Mission, was distressed. He had long taken a dim view of the outrigger jaunts of Jesuit Rively--the only one of the priests in his mission who did not make his inter-island calls by powerboat. A few months later, after Father Rively had undergone an operation for appendicitis, his superior sent him back to the U.S. to recuperate. "And don't come back without a decent ship," he ordered.

This week, Father Bill Rively, 33, will sail happily out through San Francisco's Golden Gate on a 45-ft. schooner named Romance. He had found his ship, and he was sailing her back to Truk and his life's work.

Baseball & Catechism. Bill Rively, whose father ran the china section of an Altoona (Pa.) department store, decided in the eighth grade that he was going to be a missionary. He was a student at the Jesuit university in Manila when the Japanese took over the Philippines in 1942. After three years of internment (and down from 180 to 130 Ibs.), Rively went back to his seminary studies. Ordination came a year later, then three more years of study. At last his mission assignment came--to Truk. "I had to look it up on a map," he says.

Father Rively's parish consists of 105,000 square miles of island-speckled ocean. He has special charge of 28 low-lying little islands in the Carolines with a population of 5,000--about 4,000 of them Christian. His flock, says Father Rively, are "wonderfully carefree people. They fish, gather breadfruit and sing constantly." At 4:30 each morning the patere, as they call him, begins the day with Mass. then spends the morning in classes for the children. They sit on the warm sand while the priest, who can speak all three dialects of his parish, stands at a blackboard expounding arithmetic, geography and the Roman Catholic faith.

In the afternoon there is usually a baseball game. Father Rively pitches or plays shortstop, then, clad in white cassock and sneakers, gives instruction in the catechism and a brief doctrinal sermon. In his first two years there, he estimates, he converted some 500 natives.

Crying for the Carolines. As his crew on the Romance, Missionary Rively has taken a 70-year-old captain, a cook and three other hands. They will all be flown back to the U.S. on arrival at Truk, and the Romance will have a native crew. "I'm anxious to get back," Missionary Rively explained as he worked busily in blue jeans and turtlenecked sweater to get his craft ready. "I feel I'm wasting my time in the States. I'll never be homesick because, quite frankly, I like it better in the Carolines."

He plans to live on the Romance, resume his campaign to have coral churches built on each island. Four are now under construction; each one takes about two years. But Father Bill Rively is not impatient. "I have the rest of my life to get them done," he says.

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