Jesus and Mary Are Present Amid the Dangers and Difficulties

By Sean J. Flynn, Ph.D.

In their carefully reasoned yet inspired description of the Virgin Mary’s instrumental role in the work of salvation and the life of the Church, the Second Vatican Council emphasized the Holy Mother’s sacred function as intercessor, by which she reveals and assists the unique mediating power of Christ the Redeemer.  While her role is subordinate to that of her Son, the Virgin Mary, having on earth cooperated in her Son’s mission, continues to offer her “maternal help,” so that we, the pilgrim people of God, “may the more closely adhere to the Mediator and Redeemer.”  Through her intercessions and “motherly love,” Mary, the Council Fathers remind us, “cares for her Son’s sisters and brothers who still journey the earth surrounded by dangers and difficulties, until they are led into their blessed home.”

The Blessed Virgin Mary is vital to the faith of tens of millions of Catholics.  Yet I do not exaggerate when I testify that, in a literal sense, my sister Teresa, my brother Tim, and I may not have been born, and my late brother Mark and my late sister Colleen may not have enjoyed secure and fruitful lives, had it not been for the intercessions of Mary, the Mother of the Savior.  For when, in 1952 and 1953, my father and mother found themselves unexpectedly surrounded by the gravest of dangers and difficulties, they experienced, during their darkest and loneliest hours, Mary’s assistance in their adherence to Jesus Christ, without whose love and keeping their lives would have been ruinously affected.

My parents’ ordeal began shortly before midnight on May 14, 1952, when my father, Captain John P. “Pat” Flynn, Jr., USMC, carrying out what was to be his final combat mission in Korea, was shot down by Chinese anti-aircraft artillery and captured by Chinese soldiers after parachuting to a hard landing on the slope of a North Korean mountain.  Fighting through the pain of a dislocated shoulder and broken bones in his left foot, he was rudely searched, repeatedly punched, kicked, and struck with rifle butts, and then dragged down an oxcart trail to a small village recently attacked by American bombers.  There he underwent a hasty public “trial” and was pronounced guilty of war crimes, at which point a Chinese officer taunted his prisoner with two articles seized from my father’s flight suit: a Rosary and a Miraculous Medal, the invocation of which reads “O Mary, conceived without sin, pray for us who have recourse to thee.”

The enemy officer flung the Rosary to the ground and ordered his prisoner to spit on it.  My dad refused.  His captor barked an order to a subordinate who promptly produced an axe and a chopping block.  My father was driven to his knees and his head forced upon the block.  Ordered a second time to desecrate his Rosary, he refused and so resigned himself to death. “The first thing I thought of was that I was going to be a martyr,” my dad told a reporter after the war.  “I thought of my family and how they needed me.  But I knew if I gave in to the Reds, I’d be no good for my family or myself, and that I might lose my soul.”

My father’s life was spared, but over the next sixteen months of his captivity he endured two episodes of solitary confinement punctuated by violent haranguing, food, water, and sleep deprivation, a second mock execution, recurring rounds of interrogations, and insidious psychological tortures. Facing unremitting pressure to sign a false confession that he had engaged in germ warfare, he stubbornly resisted, informing his interrogators that by doing so he “would be guilty of grievous sin in that I would be aiding a godless cause and turning my back on my faith.” Throughout his POW ordeal, until the day of his release from captivity on September 5, 1953, my father drew strength from the Rosary, which, regardless of his emotional state or physical circumstances, he recited two or three times per day, his meditations on the lives of Christ and Mary emboldening him to resist long after his patriotic zeal had expired.

My mother, Frances, who was then busily raising her first two children, fought her own agonizing version of the Korean War, which, for her, began in earnest on the afternoon of May 16, 1952, two days after my father’s capture, when an impersonal and sparsely worded Western Union telegram informed her that her husband was missing in action.  Details of his condition and whereabouts were not available.  She waited in her home for hours under the mistaken assumption that a military chaplain or a Marine officer would arrive to console her.  Alone, afraid, and terribly unsettled, she bathed and tucked in my oldest brother and sister before herself lying down to sleep. After reciting the Rosary and tossing and turning for several hours, she dozed off, her Rosary clutched in her hands.

Around midnight, my mother was, in her words, “awakened by a gentle touch,” and though she “could not make out a figure,” she was keenly aware of “the presence of someone in the room.”  A gentle voice whispered the words “Do not worry, everything will be alright.” The voice and presence disappeared as suddenly as it appeared.

My mother had undergone a spiritual turning point. From the moment of guidance in her bedroom in May of 1952 until the moment, on September 5, 1953, when she received the first official word that her husband was alive, my mother never doubted that my father had survived the downing of his aircraft. “I felt a peace and quiet come over me,” my mom recalled in a 1954 interview with The Tidings, a newspaper published by the Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles. It was as if “God had laid His hand on my shoulder, and I was sure John was a prisoner and that he would come back.”

My mother never discussed this event with her children. And when I learned of it a few years before her death in 2005, I did not press her for an explanation. I did not need one. Though my mother was never boisterous or noisy about her beliefs, her faith in intercessory prayers to Mary, the Mother of God, was manifest in her lifetime devotion to the Rosary. It was evident in the statues of Mary that my mother modestly displayed in the quiet corners of our home in Gregory, South Dakota, where my parents returned following my father’s retirement from the Marine Corps in 1966.  Her gratitude for Mary’s intercession, when, in the moment of her desolation, God rested His hand on my mother’s shoulder and stilled her anxiety, was present in our family living room, where, among the various paintings, drawings, and prints that adorned the walls, the centerpiece was a striking, yet tranquil, version of the Madonna with Christ Child.

I am here today because my father, in refusing to defile Rosary beads or collaborate with an enemy that was contemptuous of his Catholic faith, rescued his soul from a ruination that would have destroyed him spiritually, mentally, and physically and left him incapable of fulfilling his duties as a husband and father. I am here today because my mother, in seeking Christ’s mercy to relieve her of her affliction and sorrow, appealed to Mary, a supplication through which her Son, Jesus, enabled my mother to bear the hardships of a POW’s wife and, when her husband’s captivity was over, to heal his wounds and accompany him, unassumingly, in the fulfillment of his military career and the raising of their growing family.

My parents’ triumph over darkness is a testament to the boundless love of Jesus Christ and His Holy Mother, who cares for her Son’s sisters and brothers while faithfully leading them to union with Our Savior who, in the elevating language of the Second Vatican Council, “is the light of the world, from whom we come, through whom we live, and towards whom we direct our lives.”

Sean J. Flynn, Ph.D., professor and chair of history at Dakota Wesleyan University, Mitchell, SD, is a native of Gregory, SD, where he and his wife, Deborah (Stukel), also a Gregory native, attended, and were later married in, Saint Joseph Catholic Church.