Manh vividly remembers the boat journey out of Vietnam. He was just 11 years old when he and his sister, under the protection of aunts and uncles, set out from a port near Saigon.
‘It was rough, very scary, about five or six days and nights at sea,’ Manh recalls.
‘Our engine was broken and the water was coming into our boat. We were sinking. So we were pretty much waiting to die, you know?’
Then came what Manh describes as a miracle: an oil tanker appeared and rescued the 130 or so people on board the boat.
‘That day was the 15th of August [1980]. It’s Mary’s Assumption to heaven. We were all praying to her, all the Catholics. We prayed and then, yeah, she kind of answered.’
Manh was speaking after a commemorative Mass at St Ignatius’ Church in Richmond to mark the 50th anniversary of the fall of Saigon. The date 30 April is known as Reunification Day in Vietnam, the day in 1975 when North Vietnamese and communist Viet Cong forces captured Saigon, now Ho Chi Minh City, ending the Vietnam War and the 21-year north–south divide.
This Mass serves as a time of prayer and reflection for the Vietnamese people, particularly those who experienced the hardships and displacement,
But it also started a mass refugee movement of people from the south, including political dissidents and Christians, of whom Catholics were the biggest group. For the Vietnamese diaspora, 30 April is a remembrance day, and St Ignatius’ is one of the churches that holds a special Mass each year for hundreds of community members who come from all over Melbourne for the occasion.
‘This Mass serves as a time of prayer and reflection for the Vietnamese people, particularly those who experienced the hardships and displacement,’ says Chau Xuan Hùng, the master of ceremonies at the Mass.
The service was entirely in the Vietnamese language, and started with a procession to the front of the church, where parishioners paid their respects to all who had lost their lives in the Vietnam War and its aftermath. The liturgy was sung by St Ignatius parish priest Fr Trung Hoang Nguyen, and the homily given by Fr Peter Hoang Kim Huy, Asia–Pacific Provincial of the Salesians of Don Bosco.
Fifty years is a short time in the memory of a traumatic event. Many attending the Mass preferred to commune quietly among themselves, but some wanted to share their story.
Nguyen Huu Thien has been forced twice in his life to flee his home because of his Catholic faith.
As a young man, he came to Australia in 1982 via a refugee camp, but was only six years old when he and his family first became internal refugees, forced to migrate from the north of Vietnam as the communist Viet Minh ran the French out and began persecuting Catholic priests, whom they accused of collaborating with the colonisers.
Huu says when the country was divided into north and south under the Geneva Accords of 1954—a move intended to be temporary until elections could be held—there was an exodus of up to a million Catholics from the north. It was a wrenching move. ‘Our ancestors were some of the first Catholics in the north of Vietnam,’ Huu says. ‘We are very proud of our ancestors who lived under the old King, the old Kingdom.’
Like Manh and his sister—and later their parents—Huu and his wife settled in Melbourne, finding a home in the growing Vietnamese Catholic community.
Nearly 58,000 Vietnamese refugees came to Australia between 1975 and 1982, and more people arrived from Vietnam during the 1980s under family reunion programs. Most live in Sydney or Melbourne. Just under a third of the Vietnamese community are Catholics, according to census data.
Huu says when he and his then–heavily pregnant wife arrived, they were welcomed by a Dutch family, coincidentally Catholic, who had volunteered to help refugees settle in. ‘A good family,’ he says. ‘They helped us with everything. They came once a week from Lilydale, so far away from the city.’
Both Manh and Huu spoke in glowing terms about Fr Bart Huynh San, one of the earliest Vietnamese priests in Australia, who worked tirelessly to create a community around St Joseph’s Church in Collingwood. The outcome was the St John Hoan Community, named after a 19th-century Vietnamese martyr, John Doan Trinh Hoan. Chau Xuan Hùng says it was the first of its kind in the Melbourne Archdiocese.
Having places to go for Mass in Vietnamese has helped them to keep their faith strong.
Since then, a superb choir has been established—the Cung Chieu—and youth groups and movements that are still flourishing, helping form the next generation of Vietnamese-Australian Catholics.
Having an active Vietnamese Catholic community around them helped people like Manh to feel at home. Likewise, having places to go for Mass in Vietnamese has helped them to keep their faith strong, he says.
Huu says he is grateful to be able to live in a country where his faith is respected. He believes the community has repaid Australia’s Catholics: ‘I mean, now we have so many Vietnamese priests here, maybe we are the number one Catholic community.’
All photos courtesy of Thien Nguyen, unless otherwise indicated.
Banner image: Former members of Vietnam’s military joined hundreds of people at St Ignatius Church, Richmond, to commemorate the fall of Saigon. (Photo courtesy of Thien Nguyen.)
