1966 - Molly O'Sullivan

September 1, 1966

Molly O’Sullivan

Beijing

Molly O’Sullivan.

One of the most touching accounts of martyrdoms in China surely belongs to a plump, jovial Irish Catholic nun named Eamonn O’Sullivan, who was better known as Molly. Although she died in September 1966, the story to her martyrdom could not be told for 20 years, for that was the length of prison sentences her co-workers in Beijing had received, and it was feared that any further publicity of the case might add to their suffering.

O’Sullivan was born in Cork, Ireland, in 1907. She was the oldest of ten children—a moderate number in comparison to her father Ned, who came from a family of 18 children. Raised in a devout home, Molly developed a strong desire to serve the Lord and help others. She offered herself for service in China, and was accepted to work at the Sacred Heart School in Beijing. Although almost all Christian researchers presume there were no foreign believers left in China after the 1950s, the Sacred Heart Catholic School continued to function as a religious institution in the heart of China’s capital city right up until August 1966, in a facility housing eight Western nuns and approximately 70 Chinese nuns.

Children continued to attend school every day. The foreign sisters were allowed to send and receive letters during these dark years of Communist rule, and were allowed to function relatively normally. Just why Mao Zedong decided to allow this one isolated Christian institution to function in China is unclear. One possible reason is that they did not try to evangelize others, and were therefore not considered a threat. For all these years the convent and school kept a low profile, shunning publicity because they feared it would disrupt their work. Perhaps the government wanted to retain this one school and convent to show off to the world as “evidence” of religious freedom in China.

Whatever their motivation, on August 24, 1966, everything came to a sudden halt. The Cultural Revolution was underway, and this quirky enclave of Christendom could no longer be tolerated. A mob of fanatical Red Guards rang the doorbell. Olga Sofia answered the door and was brushed aside. Suddenly,

“A huge mob of Red Guards came surging up the steps and in through the front door, shouting and screaming and brandishing a large variety of weapons, knives, hatchets, scissors, hammers, whips. They went rushing through the halls and corridors of the convent, up the stairs, into the rooms, opening closed doors, breaking down locked ones, destroying anything that stood in their way and filling the whole house with the sound of their blasphemies and obscenities.”[I]

As the nuns were dragged to the lower floor, they were struck and kicked repeatedly and insulted with vile words. An elderly nun named Mary, who was 76-years-old, was attacked with a whip. She was “lashed across the face with such force that her eyes were almost knocked out.”[II] The other Red Guards shouted at the man with the whip after this. It was apparent they had been given permission to insult and rough up the foreign women, but not to kill or seriously injure them. The Chinese nuns, however, were not subject to such protection.

A few days later a mock trial was held in front of a large crowd of frenzied people, who bayed for the women’s blood. After the nuns’ veils and headdresses were torn off and trampled on by their persecutors, they were made to kneel with their foreheads touching the ground until their sentences were announced. The entire crowd shouted and screamed, “They are deserving of death!” as though they were possessed by the Prince of Hell himself. Unsurprisingly, the eight foreign women were pronounced guilty and were labelled ‘counter-revolutionaries’. This was the most serious charge possible in China at the time, and almost always resulted in execution. The ‘People’s Court’ delayed announcing the sentence and sent the eight nuns back to the school, where they were separated from the Chinese believers. Over the next few days the Red Guard never stopped intimidating and insulting the women. One source says,

“They would thrust their faces right into the nuns’ faces and shout, ‘You are a pig’ or ‘You are a dog’. They would put a pistol to a nun’s head and pull the trigger, roaring with laughter when the gun turned out to be unloaded…. One of them said to Olga Sofia, ‘Do you love Chairman Mao?’ She answered, ‘I am a Christian and I do love Chairman Mao. I love the Chinese people very much. In fact, I love you too.’ This discomfited the youth and he mumbled, ‘We don’t love you. We hate you.’”[III]

If there was one nun singled out for special persecution, it was Molly O’Sullivan. She was 59-years-old and yet was the youngest of the eight foreign nuns. As the years had rolled by, Molly had gained a lot of weight, yet she never let it dim her personality. She once wrote to her sister Pam, saying, “I am as fat as a fool.” She had long ago adopted the motto, “Laugh and grow fat.” It made her a natural target for the unsympathetic Red Guards. She was kicked and punched more than the other women, the guards perhaps thinking her larger frame would handle it easier than the others. “Fat Pig” became the normal way of addressing her. “‘Fat Pig, Fat Pig’ they would shout and chant at her for hours on end. They wrote ‘Fat Pig’ on the walls of her room, on her white habit, on her headdress.”[IV]

Early one morning the women were told they were to be expelled from China, and were ordered to pack one suitcase of belongings each. Although they had all invested many years of their lives in China, it was an immense relief to know they would not be executed or imprisoned, but would soon be home with their families. That afternoon, after their suitcases were packed, the Red Guards picked on the nuns yet again. They were

“…made to run the gauntlet up and down the stairs with their suitcases in their hands while their tormentors shouted, ‘Hurry up! Hurry up!’ and beat them on the feet and legs with bamboo canes. This was kept up until the sisters were collapsing with exhaustion. Only then were they allowed to crawl back to their rooms.”[V]

The eight sisters were taken to the Beijing train station, where members of the public kicked and struck them as they made their way onto the crowded train. They faced a daunting 40-hour journey to the southern city of Guangzhou, followed by another three hours to the border town of Shenzhen, and hopefully, freedom across the Lowu bridge into Hong Kong. A large team of Red Guards accompanied them on the trip. They continued to mock and insult the elderly women, seeing it as their job to make the journey as unpleasant as possible. The sisters were not allowed to speak to each other, while at the many stops along the way,

“mobs of Red Guards had been assembled on the platforms and stations where the train was to stop. As soon as it came to a halt, they pressed up against the windows of the carriage, shouting anti-imperialist slogans and making threatening gestures. All those young faces distorted by hatred and young fists clenched in rage were a frightening sight for the sisters, protected from them only by the width of a pane of glass. They feared that at any moment the mob might board the train and attack them, a fear which was renewed at every halting place on the 1500-mile journey.”[VI]

At the same time that Molly O’Sullivan and her colleagues were walking through their ‘valley of the shadow of death,’ some of the small number of foreign correspondents living in Beijing had picked up on the incident. As the train slowly made its way southward, the story of these eight nuns became front page news around the world, and was the lead item on radio broadcasts.

On the morning of August 30, 1966, Molly O’Sullivan looked sickly pale. Her body and mind were broken from the lack of sleep and punishment of the last week. The train arrived in Guangzhou at 2 p.m. on Tuesday. By the time they had to board the train to the border the next day, Molly had grown seriously ill, and had a fever of 40.5° C. (105° F.) As the train approached the railway bridge between Shenzhen and Hong Kong she was barely conscious. The bridge at Lowu marked the boundary between Communist China and British Hong Kong. In later years this same place came to be well-known to thousands of Christians from around the world as the main entry point for carrying Bibles into China. The bridge was about 200 yards (183 metres) long and was considered a ‘no man’s land’ between the two countries. The Chinese guards would never venture past their side of the bridge, and the British soldiers also never ventured too far, lest they be shot at.

On the Hong Kong side, dozens of priests, nuns, policemen, medics, reporters and cameramen were waiting, having presumed correctly the eight women would arrive on that particular train from Guangzhou. The train slowed down and stopped on the Chinese side of the bridge. The dramatic events of what happened next are best told in the words of Molly O’Sullivan’s biographer, Desmond Forristal:

Molly O’Sullivan being wheeled across the border into Hong Kong on a baggage trolley. She died a few hours later.

“After a pause, the watchers on the Hong Kong side saw eight nuns in black veils and white habits getting off the train. They were carrying suitcases in their hands. The Red Guards immediately started chanting slogans and waving their fists at the sisters. Many of them were carrying brooms in their hands with which they threatened to strike them.

The nuns started to walk from the train but almost at once one of them collapsed and lay motionless on the ground. Some of the others tried to help her but were prevented by the Red Guards. They were forced to stand in line while photographs were taken and shouting and insults continued. Then the Red Guards started to make sweeping movements with their brooms. The symbolism was evident. They were sweeping the dirt out of their country.

Once again, the sisters began to walk towards the bridge. They tried to help the nun who had fallen but she was too weak to move herself and too heavy for the others to carry. The people on the other side could only look on helplessly while the nuns appealed for someone to come to their aid. After some moments of indecision, a few soldiers lifted the prostrate woman and threw her face downward in a nearby trolley…. With some difficulty, a couple of the nuns managed to get it moving and pushed it laboriously the 200 yards [183 metres] to freedom.”[VII]

Cameras clicked and journalists called out questions, while fellow Christians welcomed the weary travellers to Hong Kong. An ambulance was called for and soon arrived, and Molly O’Sullivan was rushed off to St. Teresa’s Hospital. She was conscious, but gravely ill. Her condition seemed to stabilize and the doctors were not overly concerned, but during the night Molly’s temperature suddenly rose. Nothing the doctors did could lower her temperature.

At 6:45 a.m. on September 1, 1966, Molly O’Sullivan passed into her eternal rest.

When news and photographs of Molly O’Sullivan’s death were published around the world there was anger and outrage. The reaction was particularly strong in Ireland. The Irish government “had no representative in Beijing but they sent a strong protest through their embassy in London. The protest was rejected by the Chinese government and returned by post to the embassy.”[VIII] A special flight carrying the body of Molly O’Sullivan arrived at Cork airport on September 29, 1966. Molly’s grieving 84-year-old mother was among the waiting throng. She had never imagined she would outlive her beloved daughter. The whole country seemed to stop in honour of this jovial, kind-hearted nun who had died for the cause of Christ in China. Hundreds of people lined the streets as the funeral procession made its way from Ballyphehane to the City Hall. The throng of people paying their respects included

“…children in school uniforms, workers returning from offices and factories… the Lord Mayor and the City Councillors in their robes of office. Behind them marched 200 pupils from St. Aloysius’s School, where Molly had received her secondary education. As they drew near St. Patrick’s Church, the crowds were so dense that they spilled on to the roadway and the cortege could hardly pass.”[IX]

Little is known about what happened to the dozens of Chinese nuns from the Sacred Heart School and Convent who were arrested in 1966. Most of them were sentenced to 20 years in prison, but only one was ever located again. The rest simply disappeared, no doubt many of them joined Molly O’Sullivan as a martyr for Jesus Christ.

I Desmond Forristal, The Bridge at Lo Wu: A Life of Sister Eamonn O’Sullivan (Dublin: Veritas Publications, 1987), 132.
II Forristal, The Bridge at Lo Wu, 133.
III Forristal, The Bridge at Lo Wu, 136.
IV Forristal, The Bridge at Lo Wu, 137.
V Forristal, The Bridge at Lo Wu, 138.
VI Forristal, The Bridge at Lo Wu, 141.
VII Forristal, The Bridge at Lo Wu, 143-144.
VIII Forristal, The Bridge at Lo Wu, 145.
IX Forristal, The Bridge at Lo Wu, 145-146.