Religion: Flying Bishop

The sun-helmeted pilot waited for the thumbs-up sign from a frizzy-haired native, then raced his blue and white Cessna down the crushed-coral airstrip, over the palm-dotted swamplands, and high into the sky to hurdle the jagged mountain peaks concealed in thick cumulus clouds. Settling his sandaled feet on the rudder, he flew with one hand as the other fingered a heavy gold cross hanging from his neck. After a short flight-over forbidding jungles, the pilot banked his plane, swooped down toward a clearing and made a smooth touchdown on another makeshift airfield. There to greet him were the local priest, a handful of native sisters, and hordes of near-naked natives. The pilot: lean, sandy-haired Bishop Leo Arkfeld, 47, Roman Catholic Vicar Apostolic of the Wewak Vicariate, a 20,100-sq.-mi. area (more than twice the size of New Jersey) in Australia’s hot, humid New Guinea territory.

To Airman Arkfeld, this trip from the coastal town of Wewak to one of the vicariate’s 38 inland stations was routine; he logs an average of 30 flights a week, carries such diverse cargo as day-old chicks, bull calves, building material, engine parts, Australian beer, food, nuns, priests and mission helpers. Now and then he flies armed patrols, native cops or doctors to trouble spots, and he is always available to transport the sick or injured to the nearest hospital. Furthermore, says he, by plane “I am able to make many of my confirmation trips with less effort than a bishop in the U.S. or England.”

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 material for the missions’ rebuilding. In ten years of bush flying, he has become an old hand at perilous uphill landings and downhill takeoffs, slalom-like runs to avoid wild pigs on the runways, hedgehopping to stay under hanging clouds. Once one of the mission’s three pilots was heard on the radio talking to a control tower: “I’m running into clouds; I don’t think I’ll make it,” followed by Arkfeld’s booming voice: “I’m right behind you. You’ll make it.” Both he and his pilots always have.

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.

Cannibals with Manners. Five years ago Bishop Arkfeld launched his most ambitious experiment by founding the Sisters of the Rosary of Wewak. Today the roster includes 30 native sisters and novices (average age: 21) whose royal blue habits and white headdresses do not 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 to the mission for rehabilitation. Under the tutelage of Los Angeles Mission Teacher Frances Dills, 50, the author of an unpublished manuscript, My Caddy Is a Cannibal, the boys reformed, learned manners, and, says she, “they are probably the only cannibals in the world who speak pidgin with an American accent.”