of a foreign missionary society? The answer to this question only confirms the Tar Heel's supernatural wisdom. Back when Cardinal Manning began the English congregation known as the Mill Hill Fathers, critics asked why English Catholics would go abroad as missionaries when Albion was not yet reclaimed from Henry VIII's treachery. The Cardinal's reply was that God would reward the generous spirit of England's Catholics in evangelizing the heathen: "If we desire to find the surest way to multiply immensely our own material means for works at home, it is by not limiting the expansion of charity and by not paralyzing the zeal of self-denial."

Manning's ideas had impressed Father Walsh, and he, in turn, convinced Father Price of their merit. Father Price's beloved "North Carolina Apostolate" - he had built a seminary for it, and another when the first burned down - was turned over to another priest. Just as Mother Cabrini, Father Kino, and others were supposed to go to China and ended up here in America, our American apostle ended up in China.

To Father Price, the home and foreign missions were of a piece, and he was indignant that neither was sufficiently supported by American Catholics. Accusing them of "apathy" and "indifference," he thundered: "If the Catholics in this country but did their duty to both home and foreign missions a mighty change would take place both in ourselves and in the whole foreign-mission world. The matter of missions will not down. It lies in the very essence of Catholicity, and it is shameful that at present we do so little."

But what did the Church think of Maryknoll's roundabout way of converting America?

In the person of Pope Saint Pius X, she heartily approved! Father Price related the saint's reaction: "He said, when he read the schema prepared for him of the work - and he read every word of it - that he granted it, and us, all benedictions. As he was reading, he said twice that we had in America enough outside the Church - millions - who needed to be converted, but he thought this work would stimulate that, besides bringing about its own good." [Emphasis mine.]

If today's Maryknoll has abandoned the founders' vision, it is no doubt due to the fact that, unlike Saint Pius X, they do not believe that those "outside the Church. needed to be converted." And would they say, as Father Price did, "Pray and work for the conversion of countless millions now perishing"? Their interest having shifted from the supernatural to the natural, from Christian salvation to Marxist "liberation," it seems that prominent Maryknollers would have other interests.

Through the intercession of the Immaculate One of Lourdes, of Saint Bernadette and - I shall include him "privately" - of Father Thomas Price, may there arise many true sons and daughters of "Walsh and Price" to make America what they wanted it to become, the world's great missionary superpower.