“By which also he went and preached unto the spirits in prison”
In the hold of a Japanese “hell ship” transporting prisoners of war to Japan:
To a man, they also remembered a voice. When the bedlam was at its height, when men were screaming and moaning and begging for their lives, Father William T. Cummings, the Maryknoll priest who in Bilibid had read Ben Steele the last rites, would make his way to the middle of the hold and shout to be heard.
“Listen to me,” he would yell. “You must listen to me!”
Then, in a clear but calming voice, he would recite a prayer.
Our Father, who art in heaven …
Give us this day our daily bread.
And forgive us our trespasses,
As we forgive those who trespass against us…
He recited that same evensong every night, a prayer for the living, a prayer of thanks, a prayer for the dead.
The priest ministered to anyone who needed him, and almost everyone did. In a month he recited more last rites than most padres offer in a year of combat, then berated himself openly for not bieng able to hold the hand and ease the dying angst of every man in the ship who needed him.
“Father, please, pray for me,” they begged, or, “Baptize me, Father. I don’t want to die without being baptized.”
He was a short, thin man, forty-one years old, in constant pain from an old back injury that had required spinal fusion. He had chronic asthma as well, and the close air in the holds must have been torture for him. Nothing, however, seemed to slow his ministrations. He played medic as well as priest, crawling over and across men to get to the worst of the wretches in the back of hte holds. To some men, Cumming’s soft incantations — “humming whispers,” Sydney Steward called them — sounded like the voice of God; to others it was the voice of faith, or a friend.
Each night he tried to take his rice with a different circle of me. One night he talked of his days in Manila before the war. He liked working with indigents, street chldren, he said, and if he survived, he planned to continue the same kind of missionary work in Tokyo.
“The bastards are hopeless,” one of the men said.
“Son,” Cummings came back, “no one is hopeless.”
Bill Cummings died on a Sunday in the hold of the Brazil Maru, two days short of making port at Moji.
–Tears in the Darkness: The Story of the Bataan Death March and Its Aftermat
Michael and Elizabeth M. Norman
