Martyr's Heir Takes Office as Bishop

Vincent Nguyen fled Vietnam, where an ancestor was executed for his faith

From National Post (CDN)
By Charles Lewis

Vincent Nguyen's journey 26 years ago from Vietnam to Canada culminated yesterday in the pomp and splendour of his ordination as a bishop (Auxilliary of the Archdiocese of Toronto) of the Roman Catholic Church.

More than 1,000 people crammed the pews of St. Michael's Cathedral to see 43-year-old Father Nguyen become Bishop Nguyen in a ceremony that connects back to St. Peter, the first bishop of Rome.

Bishop Nguyen's friends and fellow clergymen describe him as extremely humble and shy, but his pedigree is the stuff of legend.

He is a fifth-generation Catholic, the great-grandson of a man martyred for his faith in the 19th century. As a child Bishop Nguyen dreamed of being a priest, as a teenager he steered a boat of refugees to escape Vietnam so he could live in freedom, and yesterday he became the youngest bishop in the country and Canada's first non-white Catholic bishop.

"You prepare your whole life to become a priest," Bishop Nguyen said in an interview. "But the call to be a bishop is always a surprise; it's not something you aspire to.

"Becoming a bishop shows the connection to the Holy Father, and to the succession of the apostles. It's very overwhelming to be installed in that whole tradition that goes back 2,000 years. You are being called by God so the whole thing is really a mystery."

When he left Vietnam in a rickety fishing boat with his uncles and a dozen others in 1984, he was a 16-year-old dreaming of one day becoming a Catholic priest. "I saw no future in Vietnam."

The group of refugees faced pirates, rough seas and leaks. At one point he was asked to take the helm, essentially putting the responsibility for his fellow passengers' lives on his shoulders.

"His life experience is not dissimilar to many in our archdiocese who have gone through great suffering," Thomas Collins, Archbishop of the Diocese of Toronto, said in an interview yesterday. "I regularly meet people from many countries facing persecution. People I meet tell me of the suffering of their relatives, people who have died for Christ. They are an inspiration to us."

During yesterday's service, Archbishop Collins called the blood of the martyrs "the seed of the Church." He made reference to Bishop Nguyen being a descendant of a "holy martyr."

Bishop Nguyen's great-great-grandfather, Joseph Can Nguyen, was the first in his family to become a Catholic. When Joseph was 21, he was arrested for being a Christian.

"And he was executed for being a Christian," said Bishop Nguyen. "This incredible story has been passed on in my family. The executioners tied him to a post in the river and waited for the tide to come up. The executioners very patiently would come over once in a while to see if he wanted to recant. His answer was consistently no and so he drowned. The emperor was afraid of these Christians who would not worship him.

"Sometimes I jokingly tell people that I'm tired of this story. When we would do something wrong, they told us behave as a descendant of a martyr. It's a kind of pressure, but as we grow up we more appreciate the faith of our ancestors passed on to us with their own lives."