On the east coast of Korea...
By Fr Bernard Smyth
On the east coast of Korea, thirty five miles or so south of the 38th Parallel, the town of Kangnung gazes dreamily out at the sea. It was there I found myself on a certain Sunday in July 1953. The late Fr. Tom Neligan, then pastor of Kwangnung, was temporarily absent and Fr. Pat Burke was looking after the parish. In addition, of course, to looking after his own parish of Samchok, forty five miles to the south along the sea road.
We had said a public Mass each in Kangnung in the morning, but there was also an afternoon Mass at half-past four in Samchok. So, shortly after midday, we wrapped ourselves in the most waterproof coats we could find, sat into a jeep, and headed for the south. The coats were necessary, for it knows how to rain on the east coast of Korea and that day it was giving a demonstration of what it could do.
There was a possibility also that a bridge or two might have been washed away on the road and the first of these doubtful bridges was only eight or ten miles down the road. It was there, however, when we came to it-but so was a Korean policeman with instructions to let nothing heavier pass than a jeep. He was about to wave us on when he took a closer look at Fr Burke and myself. Neither of us is exactly slim- in fact if we were weighed in a balance it is the balance that would be found wanting-and after a moment’s hesitation he finally suggested with infinite courtesy that in the case of two people so obviously precious as ourselves it might be as well if we walked across, leaving our Korean driver to bring the jeep. We acceded with what dignity we could muster, and when we took a closer look at the bridge we weren’t sorry. Better humiliated and alive, we decided, than dignified and dead. We climbed in again, and when we were about eighteen miles south of Kangnung Fr. Burke asked me if I would care to see the spot where Fr. Paddy Reilly was shot by the Reds in 1950.
The question awakened a lot of memories. On December 21, 1940, some twenty of us had knelt around the high altar in Dalgan Park to receive the priesthood at the hands of the Most Rev. Dr. Browne, Bishop of Galway. For seven years we had lived and studied, played and prayed together. That December morning was the climax of these years. It was also the beginning of the Parting of the ways. And now four of that group were dead and gone, and only one, Fr. Bernard McCloskey, had died a natural death. Fr. Paddy McMahon was killed as a chaplain in wartime France. Fr. Frank Canavan died a prisoner in a Communist gaol in North Korea. And somewhere a mile down the road we were travelling Fr. Paddy Reilly had taken his last sad look at life and had known that it was his last. It was the end of a journey that began on a September evening in 1934 when our class entered Dalgan.
Fr Reilly
And, curiously enough, my most vivid memory of Fr Reilly goes back to that first year. We spent our Christmas holidays in the college and we were, I need hardly say, games crazy. We slept in two separate huts and during the holidays the two huts played each other in Gaelic, As far as I can remember nobody was killed – which is a bit difficult to understand when one recalls the rugby match. Only a few of us knew anything about rugby but we did have the general idea that when an opponent in possession was making for the line our job was to pull him down. This we did with a will, and we enjoyed doing it. At a critical stage in the game Paddy, as he then was, made for our line, but there were four or five of us to intercept him and the situation was safe. Or at least that was what we thought as we went on to attack. What happened during the next ten seconds or so is a bit of a blur, but finally Paddy crossed our line and touched down with an uncertain number of us clinging fiercely but unavailingly to such of his limbs as we could grasp. For he was a strong man, with a strength acquired on his father’s Westmeath farm, and he was never happier in College than when working with a horse and cart.
These were some of my memories as we got out of the jeep and walked up the rough pass into the mountains on the right. It is a lonely spot with a sad brooding beauty born of its loneliness. A few hundred yards up from the road, on the left of the pass, a little mound with a cross marks the place where he was shot. For some time after the Communists invaded South Korea in June 1950, he managed to elude them, but he was captured in mid August. Then followed two weeks in prison in his own town of Mukho, thirty miles south of Kangnung. It was very hot, food was scarce and bad and Fr Reilly became weak and ill. Towards the end of August he, with a group of other prisoners, was put on the road to march the thirty miles to a new prison in Kangnung. He collapsed after twelve miles and his guards dragged him into this mountain and shot him there. Standing by that little mound a priest ordained on the same day could think about a lot of things-chiefly, I suppose, about a providence which calls on some to die for the spread of the Faith and on others merely to write about it.
FAR EAST SEPTEMBER 1956