Martyrs of Vietnam

During the Soviet period in the 1970s, priests and parishioners from the Catholic village of Honai in Vietnam told me that they would not flee from the advancing tanks of the victorious atheistic communist forces that were then five kilometers from their homes.

The women, children and elderly of this proud and resolute community gathered in prayer in churches, with the lights on. The men, in self-defense battalion formation, rosary beads around their necks, armed with old rifles, were slaughtered as they tried to stop the North Vietnamese tanks from entering their parish. Father Hoang Quynh, the parish priest of Cholon, also a refugee from the North, told me:

"For us communism is death. In Tonkin, we had an inkling of what awaited the people of the South: exactions, torture, prison, and religious persecution everywhere. From the border with China to the Mekong Delta, thousands of graves trace the painful road of Catholicism. We expect that there will be thousands more around Saigon, Hue, and Dalat. This is the price we have to pay, but we are ready. Each cross over a grave will bear witness before mankind."

Father J. Sigurd

Aspects of France, May 5, 1975