A delegation of 90 Vietnamese Catholics and seven bishops traveled to Mongolia last weekend for the chance to see Pope Francis and deliver a special message.
“We came to Mongolia to ask the pope to visit Vietnam,” Father Huynh The Vinh from Vietnam’s Diocese of Phu Cuong said on 3 September.
Vietnam is home to millions of Catholics, yet no pope has ever visited the Southeast Asian country.
Vietnam and the Holy See have never had full diplomatic relations, a usual prerequisite for a papal trip, but Vietnamese Catholics remain convinced that a papal visit could have a positive impact on the situation facing Christians in the socialist country.
“I really hope that someday the pope can come to Vietnam because if the pope comes to Vietnam it will change a lot [of] the religious freedom in our country,” Kimviet Ngo told.
Speaking at the papal Mass in Ulaanbaatar, Ngo described how she had seen Pope Francis’ visit bring hope to the Mongolian people and said she believed a similar trip to Vietnam would “be very meaningful to both overseas Vietnamese people and to people in Vietnam.”
Hung Nguyen, a 20-year-old Vietnamese-American from Houston who came to see the pope in Mongolia, told CNA that a papal visit could help to “strengthen the faith of the younger generations of Vietnamese Catholics.”
Vietnam has the fifth-largest Catholic population in Asia with an estimated 7 million Catholics. An additional 700,000 Vietnamese Catholics live in the United States today, many of whom are refugees or descendants of refugees who fled by boat during the Vietnam War.
The Catholic Church in Vietnam has also seen a rising number of religious vocations in recent years. More than 2,800 seminarians were studying for the priesthood across Vietnam in 2020, 100 times more than in Ireland.