Religion: The River Bishop

When he is in his palace, the bishop of one of the largest Roman Catholic dioceses in the world rolls out of a hammock at 3:45 every morning and pads barefoot across the rough wood floor to wash in a bucket of cold water. Then, in a grey cassock, red skullcap, and big, gold pectoral cross, he hurries next door to the cathedral to say Mass. His congregation is a ragged handful of fishermen and their barefoot wives; their boats pull out after the service just as the sun is reddening the Amazon.

For the Most Rev. James Conleth Ryan, 48, a balding, six-foot-two, ebullient, Chicago-born Franciscan, the fishermen of Santarém are the elite among the 150,000 people in his France-sized diocese. “This is one of the most backward areas in the world,” says “River Bishop” Ryan. “I am trying to show the Amazon peoples that God, at least, has not forgotten them.” In the process, Dom Tiago, as most of his flock calls him, has contracted malaria six times and learned to relish monkey meat: “It tastes like chicken, if you shut your eyes.”

Gaslights! The first thing James Ryan wanted to be was a garbageman, the second thing was a priest. “Some Baptists will find a comparison in that,” he cracks. A high point of his youth was when his father, a minor politician, wangled the first electricity in his “back-of-the-stock-yards” neighborhood. So impressive was this that when his sister read about “wanton women standing under gaslights, leading men down sinful paths,” the future Bishop exclaimed: “How awful—gaslights!”

James Ryan was ordained in the Franciscan Order at Teutopolis, Ill., in 1938, and in 1943 answered a Franciscan call for volunteers to go to Brazil. He spent his first nine Brazilian years ministering to the rubber tappers at Fordlândia, the vast plantation founded by the Ford Motor Co. and taken over in 1945 by the Brazilian government. He mediated between the workers and the plantation management, shared his medical supplies with the hospital and his canned beans with the hungry. He was then instructed to establish a new parish, centered on Santarém, which with 30,000 square miles is still Rome’s largest.

Out of Aïda. Father Ryan went back to Chicago in 1958 to be consecrated by the late Cardinal Stritch as Titular Bishop of Margo and Prelate Nullius of Santarém. He recalls his return to the Amazon as a kind of replay of the triumphal procession in Aïda. “They put me into my old jeep, all decorated with white crepe paper and gave me a bouncing ride over every dirt street in town. All the local dignitaries gave talks, and since it was an election year, they turned them into political speeches. The choir sang like crazy, and I blessed everyone within spitting distance.”

Dom Tiago lives in a drafty, 200-year-old palace of masonry and wood with huge oak doors and walls four feet thick, “to keep out the Protestants.” It boasts “a complete, live collection of every known tropical insect.” On the office wall he keeps a picture of a pre-eminent Catholic churchman whom he calls “Johnny.” He admits that he lives more like a hermit than a bishop. He has no servants, eats lunch out with priests or nuns, and for dinner has only a bowl of oatmeal—followed sometimes by a cigar and a glass of sherry.

It is Bishop Ryan’s duty to cover all of his enormous diocese every five years, and 210,000 square miles takes a lot of traveling, mostly by outboard motor and usually alone. On these trips he catches his own fish and can even make a fire by rubbing two sticks together, “provided that one of the sticks is a match.” Under him, 25 Franciscan priests, all Americans, and seven lay brothers administer churches in ten principal centers, plus 130 chapels, and 250 small settlements where the Christian community is served by a local girl, who says her rosary aloud in place of Mass.

A New Passport. Education is the bishop’s prime concern, and he is constantly raising money to build new schools and supply existing ones. Every Wednesday evening in Santarém a group of teen-aged boys “who would be in police wagons in any other town” visit him. “We discuss everything from sex to satellites and they love it,” says Ryan. “Besides a keen interest in Scripture they ask me such questions as ‘Why do nuns cover their ears?’ and ‘What kind of medicine do priests take so they won’t have to have a woman?’ ” (His answer: “Prayer.”)

There is also a class of teen-aged girls. “I tell them that no girl gets seduced if she doesn’t want to. ‘God gave you two hands,’ I say. ‘Slap the boy’s face, then step on his foot and bite his nose. If after all that you still get into trouble, then you’re just as guilty as he is.’ “

Dom Tiago’s pet project at the moment is a seminary at Santarém to teach high school and junior college subjects. A 56-room building is going up: “I have 51 men working on it—as long as I stand there watching them.” Ryan gets money for his projects on hat-passing trips to the U.S., where he inevitably confronts “a little old lady who asks, ‘Do the natives wear clothes?’ It takes all my will power to keep from snapping back, ‘Yes, they do, you lascivious-minded old hypocrite.’ ” To people who find him mercenary, he sweetly says, “Money isn’t everything—there are always stocks and bonds.”

Next fortnight he plans to take off for 13 weeks in the States on another money-raising roundup. This time the bishop hopes to be traveling on a brand-new passport—a Brazilian one. After long pondering the matter, he applied for Brazilian citizenship. “After 17 years of beans, rice, and transfusions by Amazon mosquitoes, I am a Brazilian,” he says. “The most important part of my past life was spent on the Amazon, and if I’m lucky the rest of it will be spent here, too. It may sound corny, but these are my people and I love ’em.”