Bishop Francis Xavier Ford, M.M.

The First Maryknoller and China’s First Maryknoll Martyr

Francis Xavier Ford was born on January 11, 1892, in Brooklyn, New York. From boyhood he felt drawn to the missions. In 1912, at the age of twenty, he became the first student enrolled at the newly established Maryknoll seminary in Ossining, New York, the first American Catholic foreign mission society. He was ordained in 1917, and the following year he sailed for China.

Assigned to Canton (Guangdong) province, Ford threw himself into learning Chinese language and customs. He insisted that the Church in China must be built by Chinese Catholics themselves, not imposed from outside. In 1925 he was named Prefect Apostolic of Kaying (Meizhou), a remote mountainous region. Over the next two decades, through civil war, Japanese occupation, and revolution, he built missions, schools, and churches, growing his flock from roughly 9,000 to over 20,000.

In 1946, Pope Pius XII named Ford the first Bishop of Kaying. It was a brief episcopate. When the Communists seized power, Ford refused to abandon his people. On December 23, 1950, soldiers arrested him and his secretary, Sister Joan Marie Ryan, M.M. They were paraded through the streets, beaten, spat upon, and subjected to public “struggle sessions.”

After months of imprisonment and abuse, Bishop Ford died on February 21, 1952, in a prison in Canton (Guangzhou). He was fifty-nine years old. His body was never returned to his family. He is remembered as the first Maryknoll martyr, a man who gave everything for the people he loved. In December 2017, the Diocese of Brooklyn opened the public phase of his cause for canonization.

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