Saints upset people: the cause of World War II heroine Sybil Kathigasu

Saints upset people. It is surely impossible to live a life of heroic virtue without igniting the wrath of the wicked. Even the relatively good may be angered by holy obduracy.

Unfortunately the canonisation process itself can and has upset people as well. For example, have political considerations entered the holy calculations more than they used to? And does their weight vary from one papacy to the next, as it clearly did in the case of St Oscar Romero? Would the Congregation for the Causes of Saints be inclined to push on with the cause of a traditional Catholic in a country where Islam is the official religion?

For this reason, the cause of Sybil Kathigasu that opened on 1 July this year is an interesting test case. Sybil was a devout Catholic born in Medan, Indonesia, on 3 September 1899, who died in Lanark, Scotland, on 12 June 1948.

After her family moved to Malaya, she spent most of her years in the town of Ipoh, today a couple of hours by road north of the Malaysian capital Kuala Lumpur. In June and July this year, I visited Ipoh, as the guest of a Catholic friend and colleague.

He attends daily Mass, and I joined him. On Friday 14 June, my first full day in Malaysia, we were too late for Masses in Ipoh and so drove to St Joseph’s Church in Batu Gajah, five miles away.

The town’s name means “stone elephant”, a reference to its nineteenth-century boom days as a tin-mining centre. Elephants were used to carry the ore to the landing stage on the Kinta River. Today, the tin is long gone and the town has a crestfallen appearance.

St Joseph’s church was built in the 1880s to cater for the many Chinese Catholics among the miners. Today its congregation is mainly Tamil, with a much reduced number of ethnic Chinese.

On that Friday night we were lucky that Mass was followed by Adoration and Benediction. I watched the sky through the side door above the palms change from orange to violet, as if reflecting the blessing going on inside.

What I did not know was that when I had walked up to receive communion, I was walking on the aisle along which Sybil Kathigasu had crawled on all fours on 6 September 1945, her first day of freedom after being tortured for two years by the occupying Japanese.

The Japanese Malayan campaign started on 7 December 1941. On 15 February 1942, the British garrison defending Singapore unconditionally surrendered. The Japanese had captured all of Malaya in little more than two months. British Prime Minister Winston Churchill described the fall of Singapore as “the worst disaster and largest capitulation in British history”.

In 1941, Sybil Kathigasu and her husband Dr A C Kathigasu were living in Ipoh with their three children, William Pillai, who was adopted, Olga and Dawn. Sybil was a midwife and ran a dispensary while her husband Abdon Clement, who she affectionately called “Ziew”, carried out his medical duties.

When the Japanese bombed and occupied Ipoh, the family kept up the dispensary business, but moved to the small town of Papan a few kilometres away. Sybil’s parents – the Irish planter Joseph Daly and his Indian wife Beatrice Matilda – were devout Catholics, and Ziew, a Hindu, had converted at Sybil’s and her parents’ wishes in order to marry her.

In Papan, Sybil would receive nightly visits from anti-Japanese guerrillas who stole in from their hideouts in the surrounding jungle for treatment for their illnesses and injuries. She kept this up for a year but she and her husband were eventually arrested and endured two years of interrogation and torture, before the British reclaimed Malaya.

“Suspects usually underwent one or other of the following tortures,” Sybil wrote in her autobiography No Dram of Mercy: “Flogging on bare bodies until they bled or else the victim fainted; hanging the victims upside down or else with their hands tied behind their backs and the full weight of the body on raised toes.”

It didn’t stop there.

“Then there was the ‘Tokyo wine treatment’ which meant pumping gallons of water into the victim through a hose direct from the water tap down the victim’s throat followed by a violent stamping on a board laid across the victim’s stomach until water (frequently with blood) ran out of every orifice in the victim’s body.” Then “there was…the injection of boiling water into the rectum, or the pulling out of finger nails or toe nails…” Dr Kathigasu was given the “Tokyo wine treatment” three times.

Sybil endured her own unspeakably brutal torture and never broke, but on 17 November 1943 the Japanese carried out a very specific interrogation.

Her interrogator, Sgt Ekio Yoshimuro, ordered that Sybil’s seven-year-old daughter Dawn be brought to the prison. He ordered that Dawn be hung from a tree swarming with ants. He then ordered that a brazier of burning coals be brought and placed underneath Dawn. He commanded Sybil to speak or Dawn would be burned alive.

Sybil heard Dawn call out from the tree: “Don’t tell, Mummy. I love you and we’ll die together. Jesus will be waiting for us.”

As blows and kicks then rained down on Sybil, she prayed “as I had never prayed before, ‘Holy Mother of God, have mercy. Queen of Heaven save my child. Spare my baby, O Mary; don’t let my Dawn die’”.

There was a change among the watching crowd. A Japanese officer Sybil had never seen before strode over, and “barked a few sharp commands in a guttural voice”. Dawn was lowered from the tree and freed, but the beatings continued. Yoshimuro broke Sybil’s vertebrae with the ferocity of his kicking, meaning she could not walk, and broke her jaw, causing a septicaemia that finally resulted in her death in 1948.

The British eventually returned, the Japanese retreated or were arrested and tried. Yoshimuro was hanged in May 1946.

On 6 September 1945, Sybil was freed from Batu Gajah prison. She first asked to be washed, and for a change of clothes. She then asked to be taken to St Joseph’s Catholic Church, Batu Gajah.

“A piece of torn cloth over my head, I was carried by two attendants to the church. At my request they lifted me from my chair at the door of the church, and left me to make my own way, painfully on all fours, up the aisle to the altar. Here I prostrated myself in thanksgiving and humble devotion, and here the good Father Cordiero at length found me.”

Sybil had always voiced her support for the British, even though she helped communist guerrillas. Her heroism was recognised, and she was sent to Britain. On 7 November 1947, and using two walking sticks, she hobbled up to King George VI at Buckingham Palace to receive the George Medal. The following year she was sent to Scotland for further care but died of septicaemia from the jaw injury.

She was buried in Scotland but her body was exhumed and she was returned to Malaya. Her funeral procession was the grandest the state of Perak had ever seen. Her remains were reburied in St Michael’s Church in Ipoh.

At age 11, Dawn was presented with the Governor’s Card of Commendation for her wartime bravery. Dr Kathigasu received the MBE, and remarried in 1950.

In an announcement on 1 July this year, Malaysia’s Cardinal Sebastian Francis, Bishop of Penang, called for the beatification and canonisation of Sybil Kathigasu:

“We will do well to revisit her life and works to find inspiration for our times,” he said.

Many would celebrate the canonisation of Sybil Kathigasu – who would become Malaysia’s first saint – but it could likely offend many too. It is to be hoped the Congregation for the Causes of Saints still understands the virtue of causing offence for God.

Photo: details from jacket cover of ‘No Dram of Mercy’; screenshot.

‘No Dram of Mercy’ is incorporated into a three-part volume, ‘Faces of Courage, published in April 2006 by Media Masters, Singapore. The first paperback edition of ‘No Dram of Mercy was published by Ace Books The Harborough Publishing co Ltd, London in 1957. It may be possible to track down used copies. The book is not available through Amazon.

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