Hearts on Fire: The Stories of the Maryknoll Sisters.

The Maryknoll foundress, Mother Mary Joseph (born Mollie Rogers), was an energetic Smith graduate who shaped and guided her fledgling community from an ancillary group whose members basically worked as servant/secretaries for the Maryknoll priests into an order that sent women, first to China, and then to missions around the world. The rigor of their lives, living in alien cultures, their sense of purpose and sacrifice, and the assumptions they brought to the missions are told in great detail. Especially moving is the chronicle of those years when the missioners were imprisoned or interned in the Far East after the outbreak of the Second World War.

In the period after the war, the congregation boomed (I counted over a hundred faces in the postulant class picture from the late 1950s) in number and variety of apostolates. Lernoux is especially good in retelling the encounter of Maryknoll with the emergent revolutionary consciousness that struck Latin and Central America in the post-Medellin period. In the contemporary period, the numbers of Maryknoll Sisters have dwindled but the increasing participation of lay missioners and an intense discussion over the meaning of mission assures us that the spirit of the gospel is still alive.

Only those who know this group of women at close hand will be interested in every name and mission recounted in this story. Everyone, however, will be moved by the vignettes of those who died martyrs' deaths either because their health and well-being was destroyed in Japanese internment camps or, in more recent memory, because they were murdered in El Salvador.

But there is a larger reason why this book (and books like it) need to be written and read. We are at the end of an era with respect to a certain kind of religious life, especially women's religious life. Before that era does end, it is incumbent on the church community to see that the stories of these women (and those of many other congregations) are recorded, told, remembered, and celebrated. In my estimation, one cannot overestimate the central role religious women played in the success of American Catholicism in this century. To neglect the stories of these pioneers in the faith is not only a betrayal of history but an act of injustice.

As I read this book I could not help but remember the years when The Field Afar (now Maryknoll magazine; my mother still subscribes) came into our home. We donated to "save pagan babies" and to "spread the gospel" but, more fundamentally, the missioners gave me, as a teenager, the sense that I did belong to a universal church. For that, I will always be grateful.