Word: missions
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Runways with Pigs. Raised on an Iowa farm, Arkfeld was ordained in 1943 in the Society of the Divine Word, the worldwide mission order founded in Germany in 1875. Five years later he was consecrated a bishop in Chicago, was assigned that same year to war-ravaged Wewak, where bombs and bullets had destroyed all of the society's mission houses and killed half of its priests, nuns and lay brothers. Tall (6 ft. 3 in.) Missionary Arkfeld lunged into the task of reconstruction, bought an English-made Civil Auster, then the first of three Cessnas, personally air-speeded...
More than 48,000 of the area's 212,000 natives today are Catholics-and hundreds of youngsters have been baptized "Leo," in Arkfeld's honor. In the 340 mission schools taught by 34 white and 393 native teachers, almost a thousand pupils learn the three Rs, taught in pidgin English. The vicariate also has two maternity clinics, a 400-bed hospital for lepers, a sawmill, machine shops and a cathedral at Wewak-New Guinea's first since the war -built in concrete and hardwoods...
...conceal the facial tattoos of their tribal origin. As nurses and teachers, they help the white nuns in the region, who constantly fan out to outlying parishes, get around on horseback, motorcycles or Jeeps, ford streams on oil-drum rafts, shoot snakes and birds of prey that threaten the mission's poultry flocks. So pleased is the flying bishop with the Rosary order that he now plans to launch an equivalent order for monks...
Last week Leo Arkfeld was making some last flights to each of the outlying missions, getting set to go to Rome and then go home on leave. But he plans to return to New Guinea, where there is still "something to do"-help prepare the natives for independence. Mission success notwithstanding, most of New Guinea's tribes are still warlike, and some even practice cannibalism. In 1957 the government caught four young cannibals after their tribe had defeated another (with axes and knives made of human bones) and feasted on the losers. Police handed the cannibals over...
Died. The Rev. George Bolton, 59, British-born pastor (1942-59) of the Christian Herald's Bowery Mission, a onetime gambler who wandered aimlessly from city to city, was picked up by a pastor in a Bowery basement where he had gone to sleep; of a heart attack; in Manhattan. Restored and reunited with the wife he deserted in England 14 years before, Bolton turned to helping others, called his congregation of penniless wanderers the "most desperate, most defeated, most faithful in the world," established a "halfway" center to prepare them for a return to normal society...