Q&A: From boat person to bishop
cathnewsasia.com: 1:10 16-03-2010Q&A: From boat person to bishop
In January this year, 43-year-old Vincent Nguyen was ordained as Canada’s youngest Roman Catholic bishop and the first of Asian descent. (Gisèle Nyembwe, Thomson Reuters Foundation/UNHCR News)
Twenty-seven years earlier, as he stepped onto his uncle’s wooden fishing boat on the coast of southern Vietnam, he never imagined he would end up as a leading religious figure in a cosmopolitan city on the other side of the world. He was born and brought up in the Central Highlands town of Ban Me Thuot, which was the scene of a decisive communist North Vietnamese victory in 1975.
Bishop Nguyen, whose great-great grandfather was martyred for his Catholic faith in the 19th Century, decided to flee the country by sea in 1983 so that he would be free to worship. A Japanese freighter picked up his uncle’s boat seven days into the trip and took the 20 passengers to Japan, where the young Nguyen spent a year in a refugee camp before being resettled in Toronto.
He studied for a degree in electrical engineering before becoming a priest in 1998. The new auxiliary bishop in the Archdiocese of Toronto will represent hundreds of thousands of Canadian Roman Catholics who have immigrated from Asia, Africa and Latin America. Bishop Nguyen reflected on his experience as a refugee in an exchange of e-mails with UNHCR Public Information Assistant Gisèle Nyembwe.
FULL STORY
Q&A: A Vietnamese Catholic’s journey from boat person to bishop (Thomson Reuters Foundation/UNHCR News)
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