NEWS ANALYSIS : Papal Message to Solidify Bond to Vietnamese

Affirming five centuries of spiritual unity, Pope John Paul II’s extraordinary outreach to a Vietnamese Catholic delegation in Denver today solidifies a religious bond between the Vatican and Vietnamese Christians that has held through persecution, war and exodus.

Far beyond a simple address to 15,000 ethnic Vietnamese--including 800 from Orange County--in their native tongue, the pontiff’s 30-minute special audience marks an important commitment to a country led into the beginning of America’s involvement in the Vietnam War by a charismatic Catholic leader who was endorsed by the first Roman Catholic U.S. President.

When America withdrew its troops in defeat in 1973 after its longest war, and the Communists overran the country two years later, Catholic refugees made up the majority of those who fled Vietnam by every means imaginable, eventually landing in the United States.

The papal meeting in Denver also strengthens the Vatican’s attachment to its greatest sphere of influence in Asia outside the Philippines. Beginning in the 16th Century, when Jesuit missionaries sought to win converts for the church as well as subjects for France, the Vietnamese Catholic community grew to a body of 9 million residing both in their homeland and abroad.

“The Pope is the spiritual leader of our church,” said Msgr. Peter Tien, 67, of the Diocese of Orange who is overseeing the construction of a new, $3-million Vietnamese Catholic Center in Santa Ana. “His message is to us here and to those in Vietnam. We need to live and carry out his message.”

While the Vietnamese-Americans from Orange County who will take part in the papal audience number in the hundreds, 30,000 more belong to the Diocese of Orange, where they carry on the Christian tradition of celebrating Mass, taking sacraments, observing holy days, and re-enacting the Stations of the Cross.

To many, like 81-year-old Gian Thi Le, the Pope’s visit reaffirms the church’s presence in her everyday life. Born into a Buddhist family, Le was struck as a teen-ager the first time she attended a Catholic service. Worshipers prayed for everyone, not just for their own families, as Buddhists were taught.

From that day forward, she chose to pray to God instead of Buddha.

Le had many occasions to call upon her faith, most urgently in 1972, when war consumed her South Vietnamese village and she fled. Through prayer, Le said, she miraculously escaped injury.

“They were shooting from everywhere but I was never hurt,” said Le, who lives in Garden Grove. “God saved me.”

God also guided her through an impoverished and restrictive life under Communist rule in Ho Chi Minh City, renamed after Saigon was taken. And she relied upon faith again in 1980, when at age 68, she crammed into a boat filled with strangers and ultimately made it to the United States.

Reunited with her children and grandchildren here, Le still manages to attend weekly Mass at St. Callistus Catholic Church in Garden Grove. One of her life’s highlights came in 1987 when she saw the Pope in person during his visit to Los Angeles.

“I only need to see him once,” she said. “I’m not greedy.”

Some view the Pope’s special invitation to Vietnamese Catholics as the Vatican’s latest contact with Vietnam’s tattered history, from the population’s flight south after France’s pivotal defeat by Communist forces in 1954 to the rise of Ngo Dinh Diem--a prominent Catholic and friend of New York’s Cardinal Francis Spellman--as the head of South Vietnam.

Diem’s rise to power came at a crucial time in Vietnam’s history, the month after French troops were beaten by Ho Chi Minh at Dien Bien Phu. Diem provided the United States with an acceptable ally who had trained at a New Jersey seminary and could rally the support of Catholics and other anti-Communist forces. After the French defeat, nearly 1 million people, most of them Catholics and with the assistance of the United States, fled south.

Under Diem, South Vietnam was provided hundreds of millions of dollars in aid from the United States and Catholics prospered in key government and business positions. The Catholic Church became the largest landowner in the country. But U.S. leaders were later horrified when Diem’s government troops shot and killed eight Buddhists during a peaceful public gathering in the Central Vietnamese city of Hue.

When the Buddhist population revolted and a rumored coup against Diem turned serious, the Kennedy Administration acquiesced in Diem’s 1963 overthrow, which resulted in the South Vietnamese president’s assassination. Three weeks later, Kennedy was shot and killed, adding to the grief of Catholics worldwide.

While America’s military role mounted in Vietnam, the Central Intelligence Agency recruited an 18-year-old Vietnamese Catholic named Khoan Nguyen to join a group of commandos for paramilitary operations in North Vietnam.

The CIA was well-established in Vietnam by the mid-1960s, having spun a web of secret intelligence networks throughout the country.

On one particular mission, Nguyen and others were dropped into enemy territory with instructions to wait for supplies. Hampered by cold winter wind and fog, the unit waited 10 days for a plane to arrive. But the Viet Cong came first, and the commandos were captured, subjected to beatings, starvation, physical exertion and mental abuse in a Hanoi prison.

“I wanted to die but they wouldn’t let you die,” he said many years later.

For the next 18 years, Nguyen waited for his release from a Communist re-education camp. An equal number of Catholics and Buddhist prisoners worshiped side by side, he said.

“I owe the rest of my life to God because he helped me to survive,” Nguyen said. “I believe if I can withstand all I went through in prison, then whatever comes in this life now can only be fantastic.”

Nguyen now lives in Costa Mesa and from home, can walk to Vietnamese services at St. John the Baptist Roman Catholic Church.

American combat troops had arrived in Vietnam for the first time in 1965 and by the end of that year, some 200,000 troops were involved in the war. President Lyndon B. Johnson ordered the bombing of North Vietnam. By late 1967, 500,000 troops were in place.

Under President Richard Nixon, troops were gradually withdrawn as bombing was renewed in the early 1970s. By 1973, the last of the American troops left Vietnam and when Saigon fell to the Communists in 1975, a mass exodus occurred and hundreds of thousands of refugees came to the United States by boat. Among them was Nhi Thu Nguyen, 53, who now lives in Laguna Hills. Nhi Thu Nguyen and Khoan Nguyen are not related.

With five children--ages 4 to 11--in tow, Nhi Thu Nguyen had to leave her husband behind as he stayed to help the falling South Vietnamese government.

“At that time, I felt I needed God the most,” Nguyen said. “To come to a new land with two empty hands and five children, I didn’t know how we would be received by the American people, I didn’t know how I would feed my children.”

While waiting at Camp Pendleton, a refugee staging area, for someone to sponsor her family, Nguyen turned down a family friend who wasn’t Catholic.

“I wanted my children to be able to go to Mass and learn Catholicism,” said Nguyen, who had attended Mass daily with her children while they stayed at Camp Pendleton.

Three months after her arrival, Nguyen was reunited with her husband.

Reflecting now on her Catholic upbringing in Vietnam, inspired by the faith of her grandparents, Nguyen realizes just how strong her religion grew in a country filled with despair and struggle.

“Thousands of people were executed for their faith but that only bred more believers,” she said.

Nguyen credits the Vatican with an open-mindedness in the 1960s in accepting a host of cultural differences that it found peculiar, such as Vietnam’s cultural religion or worshiping ancestors by burning incense.

“The Vatican changed its mind in its new thinking of openness to allow more people to join the faith,” she said. “They recognized the cultural value of remembering our ancestors and reasoned that even our ancestors had been children of God.”

Journalist Stanley Karnow, who wrote a definitive book on the country and its conflicts titled, “Vietnam: A History,” said Catholicism has always held appeal for the Vietnamese, particularly to those who live far from their homeland.

“Christianity’s egalitarianism has always appealed to many Vietnamese, who like the notion that all men are created equal,” Karnow said. “The impact of the Catholic Church on Vietnam has been enormous and the Pope obviously sees all these Vietnamese Catholics as part of his flock.”

Because the Vatican and Vietnam have no diplomatic relations, the Pope is not expected to visit the country anytime soon. In fact, during John Paul’s tenure as pontiff, relations with Vietnam have grown increasingly stormy.

In 1988, the Pope infuriated the Communist government by canonizing 117 priests, missionaries and laity from the Vietnamese Roman Catholic Church, all of whom had been decapitated, burned alive, drawn and quartered or otherwise tortured to death throughout history.

John Paul’s three-hour outdoor Mass in St. Peter’s Square, conducted at times through thunder and rain, drew 20,000 pilgrims, including 8,000 Vietnamese. Hanoi’s chief religious affairs officer called the service an “obstacle to the Vietnamese desire to have friendly relations with the Vatican.”

In an emotional service which touched on past atrocities, John Paul also spoke of those today in Vietnam “who work, sometimes in anguish and abnegation, with the sole ambition of being able to persevere in the vineyards of the Lord.”

He praised the “vitality and grandeur of the Vietnamese church, its vigor, its patience and its capacity to face difficulties of all kinds and to proclaim Christ.”

The National Conference of Catholic Bishops considered a call in 1989 for the U.S. government to extend diplomatic recognition to Vietnam but, weighing the repressive climate that still exists against the religion, endorsed a more lukewarm stand that spoke of improved relations.

Los Angeles Archbishop Roger M. Mahony, who headed the committee asking for normalized relations, indicated that his committee wasn’t endorsing the Communist regime but wanted to open a dialogue for humanitarian assistance and religious freedom in Vietnam.

More recently, church groups and missionaries have noticed a softening of the Communist government’s attitude toward the Catholic Church. Catholic Relief Services, for one, started working in central Vietnam late last year. Catholic churches have been allowed to open preschools in what was once South Vietnam, according to the Catholic organization.

Whether or not relations with Vietnam improve, the Pope’s audience in Denver today at the close of World Youth Day festivities lays the groundwork for a younger generation of Vietnamese.

While they may not have a full grasp of Catholicism’s troubled history in their native homeland, somehow they have been drawn to God’s word in uncertain times.

For Tram Anh Le, a 19-year-old Huntington Beach woman in Denver to see the Pope, God’s teachings are unimpeachable and form the basis of daily life in this country. Catholicism, or “Dao Duc Chua” means daily prayers, weekly Mass and a strong adherence to the church’s message.

“I am a Catholic, I believe in the religion and its teachings with all my heart,” she said softly but earnestly. “I follow God’s, and therefore, the Pope’s, teachings and (whether) whatever he says is right or wrong, so be it.”

Times staff writer Lily Dizon in Denver contributed to this report.