Melbourne, Australia - A SIGN in English and Vietnamese outside St John the Evangelist Catholic Church in East Melbourne lists times for Mass (gio le) on weekdays (ngay trong tuan) and weekends (cuoituan).
The first words from the Gospel of St John on an archway of the ornate, high-ceiling church in Victoria Road — "Verbum Caro Factum Est Et Habitavit In Nobis" — are in Latin.
The description on a painting of 117 Vietnamese saints is in Vietnamese, Spanish and French. In a small container on the altar is a relic from the shoulderblade of the only female among them, 18th-century saint Agnes Le Thi Thinh.
"My baptismal name is Joseph, my mother called me Tien, my middle name is Duc and my surname is Bui," says the priest. Almost 30 years have passed since he was among 14 fugitives who fled from near Saigon in a fishing boat. The vast majority of his 820 parishioners are of Vietnamese heritage.
"The Australian people, they know me as Father Joe; the Vietnamese call me Father Tien," says the 56-year-old clergyman, cited among about 100 by an RMIT academic who says Vietnamese priests in Australia are growing in number and proportion and that "the future will no longer be a church strongly dominated by the descendants of the Irish Catholic pioneers but may become over time … dominated by the Vietnamese and the other ethnic communities".
RMIT intercultural studies professor Desmond Cahill said at a conference at Melbourne University's Sidney Myer Asia Centre that Vietnamese migrants had stepped into the breach to fill a shortage of priests. "Much more than any other immigrant community, the Vietnamese have given their sons to the celibate priesthood of Roman Catholicism," he said at the event, which marked 30 years of the community's settlement in Australia.
Professor Cahill said Vietnamese people were profoundly spiritual. "Perhaps nowhere else has the Vietnamese presence been more noticeable than in transforming the religious face of Australia," he said.
The first of the boat people ordained in Australia in 1979, Father Tien welcomed us to his parish office (van phong giao xu). He was a seminarian in Vietnam at the fall of Saigon, fled in November 1976 after the seminary closed and came to Australia in February 1977 after four months in a Thai refugee camp.
He laughs as he recalls how interest rate increases "nearly killed me" after he raised a $350,000 loan to buy the Cricketers' Arms hotel in Flemington to found a church.
The second eldest of a farmer's 10 children, he was born in Nam Dinh in north Vietnam. The family moved south after the communist defeat of the French in 1954. French and Spanish missionaries had brought Catholicism to South-East Asia in the mid-16th century, and now the faith is shaping the future of religion in this country.
As Australia became both a more secular and a more multi-faith society, about a third of Australia's 357,000 Buddhists were of Vietnamese heritage. Vietnamese Catholics came largely in the first waves from Vietnam, escaping in fear that their anti-communism would make them targets.
Call to boost clergy numbers
THE number of Catholic priests in Australia needs to increase more than twenty-fold, according to the nation's clergy, who have reopened the debate on married and women priests. The National Council of Priests, representing about half the country's clergy, is pushing for the Vatican to revisit the centuries-old priestly prerequisite of celibacy to meet the global goal of having one priest ordained for every 50 families or 200 Catholics.
In Australia, Melbourne priest and statistician Father Eric Hodgens estimates there is one priest for every 4500 Catholics. As priests from the baby boomer generations retire and die, the ratio is likely to worsen.
The council's suggestions have been handed to Australia's three episcopal representatives, including Archbishop of Sydney George Pell, who are among more than 250 bishops gathered in Rome this month to consider issues related to the celebration of the Eucharist.
In its own working paper for the gathering, the Vatican acknowledges the shortage of priests is affecting access to confession but does not address celibacy or women priests.