When Father Hoa Nguyen attended the dedication Mass of a newly built church in his mother’s home village of Nhat-Tay, Vietnam, with his family members and parishioners of Sacred Heart, he knew why the villagers stood tall with big smiles on their faces that day.
“They are very proud because the percentage of the Catholics is very small,” said Fr. Hoa, “— only two to three percent (in Hue, where Nhat-Tay is located), but the church was beautiful.” Fr. Hoa is pastor of Sacred Heart Church in Wichita Falls.
“Part of the church itself is not just the building where you go worship, but it truly is the face and the witness of the presence of Christianity. By the church being strong with a building like that, it indicates to the village that the Catholic Church is very strong,” Fr. Hoa said.
This church is the second church to be built in Nhat-Tay village in Vietnam, where Fr. Hoa Nguyen's mother grew up.
Several years earlier, Sacred Heart was looking for a foreign mission project it could do as a parish, said Larry Berend, longtime parishioner, who was on the finance committee at the time.
At about the same time, Fr. Hoa and his family discovered that the church in Nhat-Tay, was barely useable after all the damage from the Vietnam War as well as from other wars and typhoons. Fr. Nguyen said Sacred Heart parishioners looked at foreign missions in Honduras and Mexico, but the Diocese of Fort Worth deemed them both too dangerous due to a revolution and drug cartels in those countries. So they decided to help with the church in Nhat-Tay.
“That was the whole idea. We wanted to help someone somewhere else,” said Berend.
Sacred Heart groups sponsored various fundraisers (like parish breakfasts), and they also asked individuals to donate funds for it, Fr. Hoa said.
The total cost of the new church was $200,000, and Sacred Heart Church donated a total of $185,000 of it.
The villagers actually built the church themselves, and since they are a farming community, they had to work around planting, harvest, and all their regular duties, Fr. Hoa said. On May 17, 2007, they laid the first stone. The whole process of building a church that seats 300 took four years.
“The farmers did everything by hand — even mixing the concrete. No machines were used,” he said.
“I was amazed,” said Berend. “For $185,000, you don’t expect a lot, but it was as big as Sacred Heart.”
According to Fr. Hoa, before the missionaries came to Vietnam, the villagers were all pagans who worshiped different gods and their ancestors in their place of worship. When the missionaries came, many people in the village became Christians. When the community center where they had worshiped collapsed, the first church was built.
At center, Archbishop Steven The Nhu Nguyen, Fr. Hoa’s uncle, of Hue presides at the dedication ceremony of Nhat-Tay Church in Vietnam. Pastor of the church, Fr. Hoa Quang Le, assists him on the right.
That first church was in the village for about150 years. During the war, it was badly damaged, so the church they just completed is only the second church ever built there, Fr. Hoa said.
Fr. Hoa Nguyen, his parents, Thao Nguyen and Thuy-Tien Le; his uncle, Thi Nguyen, and four Sacred Heart parishioners, Gene Douglass, Jessica Morath, and Larry and Peggy Berend attended the Jan. 12 dedication of Nhat-Tay Church.
“It was a beautiful ceremony. We didn’t understand what all was said, but our Masses are the same, so you could tell what they were doing,” said Peggy Berend, Larry Berend’s wife.
The Berends said there were a lot of priests present at the dedication Mass, two bishops including Fr. Hoa Nguyen’s uncle, Archbishop Stephen The Nhu Nguyen of Hue, and lots of nuns, as well as Nhat-Tay parishioners.
“It was definitely a big deal for them, and they were proud of what they had done,” Peggy Berend said. “A lot of people didn’t fit, so they had to stand outside, and they watched when the shutters were open.”
Morath pointed out that the villagers had invested a lot into their new church.
“Here, we put up the money to build a church, but they, their hands and everything went into working for that,” said Morath. “You could tell they were very proud and gave all that they had, pretty much, to have that celebration. They put on their best and had a huge feast afterwards, and you knew, this is what the village had to offer you …. Everyone was so happy. It was raining, but it didn’t matter,” she said, laughing.
Peggy Berend said the church dedication was the main reason they all went to Vietnam, but they also did some sightseeing, with Fr. Hoa as their guide.
Larry Berend and Gene Douglass both said that this was their second trip to Vietnam because they had both been to Vietnam during the war 41 years ago, and they both had had thoughts of visiting Vietnam since the war.
“I could never imagine how that would happen,” said Douglass. “Who would I go with? Surely I wouldn’t go by myself. But when this came up, it was just perfect.”
While working around the planting and harvesting seasons, the farmers of Nhat-Tay, Vietnam, build their new church.
Douglass talked a lot about the sight-seeing they did. From visiting a cave system that was featured in the National Geographic in 2011, to the Citadel in Hue, to the sites of two Marian apparitions in Lavang, Quang-Tri, (1798) and in Tra-Kieu, Dang, (1885) and to the Perfume River in dragon boats to visit the tombs of various kings of the Nguyen Dynasty, and to the various cemeteries to pay respects to the ancestors of Fr. Hoa Nguyen’s family.
To Morath, Douglass, and the Berends, it seemed like many of the people they met were related to Fr. Hoa Nguyen. Fr. Hoa said in Vietnamese culture, they do not use the word “cousin” — all family members are considered closer than that and are called uncles, aunts, brothers and sisters. He said they are a very close-knit family.
“Catholics are the minority in Vietnam but we were with Father and his family so my personal experience was that we were surrounded pretty much by Catholics the whole time,” Morath said. “The first two weeks, his cousins fed us three meals a day and made sure we were fed and that everything was okay. The hospitality was amazing as well as the cohesiveness of the culture, of the family,” she said.
Morath and Douglass said they both attended the week-long celebration starting Jan. 6 of the 50th anniversary of the ordination of Archbishop Stephen The Nhu Nguyen, the brother of Thuy-Tien Le, Fr. Nguyen’s mother.
Both Larry Berend and Douglass talked about how Fr. Nguyen could trace ancestors on both his mother’s and father’s side who were among the 118 Vietnamese martyrs named as saints by Blessed Pope John Paul II. Fr. Nguyen even took them to visit the tomb of St. Tran Van Trong, the ancestor of Thao Nguyen, Fr. Nguyen’s dad.
“The trip was really exciting and happy for us besides the accomplishment of [Sacred Heart], to see how we can help the people in the village continue to live their faith,” said Fr. Hoa, “but also, part of it was a reconciliation for Larry and Gene to see that the country is not like it was during the war, and for the younger generation like Jessica to experience the culture — that it is different than what you hear about Vietnam — the war, the ugliness and all that….” Fr. Hoa said.
Copyright © 2012 by North Texas Catholic