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| September 1997 | Cardinal Mindszenty Foundation | |
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Message from Cardinal Kung
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CMF COUNCIL 1961-1997
In 1982, CMF Research Director, John Boland, accompanied Father John A. Houle, S.J. on an extensive trip to the Far East, visiting various Mindszenty Foundation Council Members and other religious leaders who had been imprisoned by the Chinese Communists.
It was typical of the many "duties" Father Houle undertook for CMF during his 36 years as one of our expert advisors on atheistic Communism and on spiritual directions.
Father Houle, in September 1988, wrote our Report entitled "Reflections on China's Mindszenty," a tribute to Bishop Ignatius Kung of Shanghai, his superior in China before both endured years of imprisonment for the Faith as ordered by Chairman Mao.
And in May 1992, Father Houle was the subject of our Report "A Miracle Confirmed" on his miraculous cure from a deadly disease. This declared miracle eventually led to the canonization of St. Claude de la Colombiere.
In remembrance of a remarkable life for the Church and his service on behalf of the Cardinal Mindszenty Foundation, the following is a brief memorial in honor of a beloved man of God, who died on the feast day of Blessed Edith Stein, a Catholic martyr of the Nazi Holocaust of WWII:
Rev. John A. Houle, a Jesuit missionary who was jailed in Communist China in the 1950's, and later became the determining miracle for canonization of St. Claude la Colombiere, died August 9 at Santa Teresita Hospital in Duarte, California where he had resided for nearly seven years.
He was a member of the California Jesuit Missions and a long-time advisor and Council Member of the Cardinal Mindszenty Foundation, as well as a stalwart promoter of devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus.
A popular speaker known for his humor, Father Houle often regaled audiences with stories of his experiences with inept Chinese Communist bureaucrats. At the same time, he would explain how he was able secretly to celebrate Mass in his prison cell without his jailers' knowledge--a poignant account recreated on video by the Mindszenty Foundation entitled
"The Heart of a Priest" and available from CMF for a modest donation.
Ordained in San Francisco in 1945, Jesuit Father Houle taught at Loyola University High School before being assigned to missionary work in China in 1947. His first post was at Peiching at the Chabanel Language School. After ten months he was sent to a mission station outside of Yangchow. He was there for a year when the Communists began arresting mostly native priests in the area and his superiors ordered him to Shanghai's Jesuit theologate. A few months later he was appointed associate pastor of Christ the King parish in Shanghai where he remained from 1949 until his in 1953 with a dozen other foreign missioners.
News accounts at the time noted that Communist authorities surrounded Christ the King church with barbed wire to prevent demonstrations by Chinese Catholics opposing the arrests.
Father Houle was imprisoned, starved and frequently flogged for four years until his release in 1957 and expelled from China. Back in the States, he returned to work for the California Jesuit Missions and often traveled to the Far East for the Jesuits, visiting and conferring with missionaries in Japan, Thailand, Hong Kong and Singapore.
One of his stops included an orphanage in Macao run by Mother Teresa's Missionaries of Charity where he was able to gather the latest news about Chinese refugees who had recently escaped from the mainland.
"Not one day of my life goes by," he once told an interviewer, "that I do not think about my Chinese brothers and sisters I left behind and the suffering they are enduring for their faith. They are dearer to the Sacred Heart and His Blessed Mother than any of us can even imagine."
Despite several operations for an injured spine, aggravated by the intense beatings he endured in prison, Father Houle continued an active priestly life. Though in constant pain, he traveled in the U.S. coast-to-coast appearing at many of the Mindszenty Foundation's conferences in addition to his duties for the Jesuits.
Just before Christmas in 1989, he was diagnosed with pulmonary fibrosis, a lung disease that is always fatal. By February he was given only a few days to live. At Santa Teresita Hospital, run by the Carmelite Sisters of the Sacred Heart, his superior Fr. Frank Parrish--director of the Apostleship of Prayer for the Los Angeles Archdiocese--arrived at Father Houle's bedside with a first class relic of Blessed Claude la Colombiere, a small sliver of bone. He placed it on the dying priest's forehead and prayed for a miracle.
Three days later, Father Houle's condition had greatly improved and, to the amazement of his doctors, x-rays showed the pulmonary fibrosis had completely disappeared. The Jesuit priest's physician, Dr. Gary Conrad, said he had no explanation for what happened: "While, as a physician, I can't affirm or deny miracles as such, I'd have to say, and I have attested, that there's simply no medical explanation for the sudden turnabout in his condition. He was too far gone for that."
What happened next was detailed in The Mindszenty Report (May 1992) as follows:
With Dr. Conrad's assistance, and that of Sr. Maria Elia, Santa Teresita's pastoral director, Fr. Parrish gathered medical data, pertinent x-rays, and other information to submit to the Sacred Congregation for the Causes of Saints.
Archdiocesan officials, especially Los Angeles Bishop John Ward, conducted extensive interviews with the hospital's staff physicians and personnel about the case. The Vatican postulator for the cause of Jesuit saints, Fr. Paolo Molinari, came to Los Angeles in October 1990 and conducted his own 10-day inquiry. A 200-plus page report on Father Houle's apparent miraculous recovery from terminal pulmonary fibrosis was subsequently submitted to high Church authorities in Rome who ruled, in 1991, that "there was no question of human agency in the events surrounding the Jesuit's remarkable recovery." The judgment was then sent to Pope John Paul for recommendation.
Months later came a letter from Fr. Peter Gumpel, the Jesuit secretary for the office in Rome that studies Jesuit causes of saints: "It is a joy for me to inform you that the medical board of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints has declared unanimously that a cure effected by God through the intercession of Blessed Claude de la Colombiere is so extraordinary that it cannot be explained by medical science."
Father Houle's miraculous cure was the third and final one necessary for Blessed Claude's canonization. On May 31, 1992--as a witness to a personal miracle by his 17th Century fellow Jesuit-the priest who had suffered imprisonment by the Chinese Communists was present at St. Claude's canonization Mass in St. Peter's Basilica in Rome as Pope John Paul 11 presided.
Afterwards, he told friends: "It was a humbling experience" of his illness. "But, I have another gift of life, it's a mystery, but I am grateful for the added days and maybe years. Jesus did this as his approval of the Sisters here at Santa Teresita and their devotion to the Sacred Heart."
On August 13, 1997 a funeral Mass was concelebrated by 35 priests in the hospital's crowded chapel for John A. Houle, S.J., the last survivor of six children born to Mr. & Mrs. John H. Houle of Glendale, California. His was a remarkable life to be sure. But the most important event of all, he often said, occurred at Cathedral High School when God told him he was to become a priest.
In a small booklet he composed on the Golden Anniversary of his Ordination, Father Houle summed it up in the words of Pope Paul VI:
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