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MY FAVORITE PRIEST
Father Francis Rouleau:
Celestial Dragon
By Barry Martinson
n After my sabbatical in 1983, I was undecided as to whether I should return to my former mission or not. I went to Los Gatos, as so many other young Jesuits before me had done, to consult with Father Francis. Knowing previously of my indecision, he had written me this short but loving note: “Perhaps if we talked together, father and cherished son, the Holy Spirit would give you an overflow of his light and wisdom and direction, and the path ahead would be ever so clear and your eagerness to follow it ever so enthralling.”
Father Francis was asleep in his chair when I opened the door to his room. His thin white hair was covered with a black beret and his head bent slightly forward. His hands rested peacefully in his lap. Behind him, the light streamed in through a large window. Beyond were the vineyards, with workers pruning the brightly-colored vines.
I walked over and lightly touched his shoulder. Immediately his eyes opened. He embraced me with remarkably large, strong hands and greeted me with a powerful and clear voice. When I began to talk, he turned quickly to his desk and pulled out a paper and pen.
“I am deaf now—totally,” he said, “so you must write down what you wish to say. Then I will read it—every word.”
I wrote about the problems, hardships and frustrations I had experienced at my mission and about my concern if I should stay there or apply for somewhere else. He read my message, then fastened his eyes on mine.
“I am so happy you are there at your mission with those wonderful people,” he said.
I looked down again at what I had written and wondered if he had read it correctly. “But don’t you think I should go somewhere else?” I asked.
He reached over and took my hands in his own. I stared at those old and wrinkled hands, still pulsing with so much life—like the gnarled and ancient grape vines on the hills outside. “I feel deeply that God is leading you back to your mission,” he said, “leading you slowly, patiently—but of a certainty.”
“It is hard to go back,” I said.
“Of course it is hard!” Father Francis said to me, showing not a trace of sentimentality. “If it were easy, I would be worried. But since it is difficult, I know for certain this is what God wants for you.”
I looked at Father Francis’s face as if for the first time and saw there a portrait of pain and suffering, but also of joy and peace. He was a very old and sick man whose life had been totally poured out for others. And this was his closing message to me, now burned in my memory: “It was by the Cross that Jesus saved others,” he said. “If we are to follow Him, how can we expect anything better? Only by the Cross will our work be effective.”
Outside his window I could see the workers had finished pruning the grape vines, leaving only the gnarled old stumps to reach with grasping fingers and yearning arms to the heavens above. The bare vines rose from the earth like rows of crosses in the distance. It was the lesson of his life.
“I will say good-bye now,” Father Francis said weakly, as he held me close to him, “I will not be here when you return.”
I tried to say something but had no words. I wanted to express my gratitude to him—for so many years, for my life, for a lifetime—but I could say nothing. Was there anyone who ever loved like him?
For one last time I looked at this beautiful, holy, eighty-three-year-old priest and friend and saint. Then I closed the door to his room and left with a light heart, knowing I had received the very best—and the very last—he could ever offer.
It wasn’t long after sending me on his way that Father Francis left also on his own journey. His gnarled and yearning hands, so like the stumps of those ancient grape vines, had found their goal at last. I barely reached my mission before I received word that he had died peacefully in his sleep.
But blossoms would appear once again on the vine—and the grapes that were crushed would become the wine that would last forever.
Father Francis Rouleau was a China missionary, Jesuit historian, teacher, counselor, and spiritual master. Born in 1900, Francis had originally looked forward to a career in high government service. Although accepted by the Naval Academy at Annapolis, ill health forced him to give up the appointment. Finding his true vocation in the Society of Jesus, he volunteered for the China mission and went to Shanghai in 1929. He was ordained there in 1935 and taught Church and Jesuit history in the theologate of Zikawei until his exile to the Philippines in 1952.
Father Francis continued as professor of the theologians in Baguio for several more years before being assigned to Rome for further research on the Jesuits of Old China. During his seven years of work in the leading archives of Europe, Father Francis discovered many previously unknown manuscripts on China mission history. His keen mind unlocked the mysteries of the Chinese Rites Controversy, on which he became the world’s foremost authority.
In 1963, health needs brought him to Los Gatos, California. For the next 20 years, amid increasing bodily ailments, he carried on his history work and became spiritual father to a new generation of young seminarians, including myself, who saw in this saintly scholar an embodiment of the Jesuit ideal to which we aspired. After his death in 1984, the vast resources of Francis’s China research formed the foundation of San Francisco’s Ricci Institute for Chinese-Western Cultural History.
Father Rouleau was my favorite priest. Plagued with ill health most of his life, yet bursting with the inner strength of God, he knew what it meant to suffer for Christ and spread his love throughout the earth. But at the start of his missionary career, this young priest was just like any of us, setting out on a great adventure.
In a short preface to one of Father Rouleau’s stories from Shanghai, his brother Ed wrote this telling description of the young missionary on his journey of a lifetime:
“In the fall of 1929 a small group of Jesuits sailed from Seattle en route to China where they were to begin—and end—their lives as missionaries. Among their number was Francis Albert Rouleau, 28 years of age, tall, blond, bashful, highly tensioned, esthetic, refined, and in delicate health.
“For what reasons, other than his own spiritual pleadings, he was selected as a missionary to that far-off Asiatic land—a land where, presumably, the first requisites of a missionary are the blessings of vigorous health, a strong back and a copper stomach—was quite beyond the appreciation of his brothers and sister.
“But the Society of Jesus can be expected to do the unexpected.”
Father Rouleau’s twin loves were for the Church in China and the Society of Jesus. His life, at once tragic and uplifting, reveals not only a profound knowledge of China’s religious history, but his deeply personal affection for the Jesuit ideal.
The life of this holy priest can be a beacon to all, especially the young, in their quest for guidance and inspiration on how to live their own ideals to the very fullest.
You are invited to contribute to this series by sending in an account of a priest whom you admire. Articles should not exceed 800 words. The best of these will be printed. Send to “My Favorite Priest,” c/o Homiletic & Pastoral Review, 50 S. Franklin Turnpike, Suite 1, Ramsey, N.J. 07446. If you have a good photo of the priest, please send that also. Enclose a stamped self-addressed envelope, if you wish to have your article returned. . . . Fr. Barry Martinson, S.J., works with aborigine tribes in Taiwan.—Editor
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