Age: 32
Parish Assignment: St. Ann, Metairie
First Mass/Masses of Thanksgiving: June 2, 4 p.m., St. Agnes, Jefferson;
June 3, 11 a.m., St. Cletus, Gretna

Mother prayed for his vocation in the womb
By Beth Donze, Clarion Herald

He didn’t know the story until recently, but when Deacon Vincent Kien Trung Nguyen was in his mother’s womb, she prayed that her ninth and final child would one day become a priest.

Sadly, Mrs. Nguyen died before she could see her son go the full distance, passing away last year on her son Vincent’s birthday.

“I think my family was truly my first seminary. My mother was the biggest supporter of my vocation to the priesthood,” said Deacon Nguyen, who grew up 60 miles south of Hanoi, in northern Vietnam.

Although restrictions on religious freedom enacted by Vietnam’s communist regime had loosened by the time he came of age, Deacon Nguyen was well acquainted with their impact: His uncle had been jailed twice because of his own desire to become a priest and had to wait nearly 40 years to enter the seminary. He was ordained in 1998 and died in 2000.

“He gave me a great lesson of being faithful to the Lord until the end of his life,” said Deacon Nguyen, who was able to go to Mass freely and become an altar server at 6.

The attraction to the priesthood lessened as he entered adolescence but came rushing back at 19, when the bishop of Hanoi invited the young adult to a Christmas Day Mass at a hospital for lepers.

“(I was inspired by) seeing the sick and also seeing the good shepherd in the bishop who went to the hospital to visit the sick on Christmas Day,” Deacon Nguyen recalls. “On Christmas Day you can say Mass in the cathedral; you can spend that afternoon with your family. But instead, he went to the hospital to visit the sick. I think I heard the call to become a good shepherd like him.”

Deacon Nguyen went to law school in Hanoi for four years, residing in the bishop’s rectory and assisting him in liturgical celebrations.

After doing well in the seminary entrance exam, Deacon Nguyen was invited to study in the United States in 2010. He immersed himself in the English language at Divine Word College in Iowa before earning a master’s degree in philosophy and religion at Illinois’ Mundelein Seminary.

He recalls being impressed by Archbishop Gregory Aymond during trips to New Orleans to attend friends’ ordinations.

“He really knew his deacons and his priests personally. He knew the personal vocation stories of each one, and he told the story during the homily,” said Deacon Nguyen, who enrolled at Notre Dame Seminary in 2016.

As a deacon intern at St. Cletus in Gretna, Deacon Nguyen experienced the joys of baptisms and weddings and the sad moments of illness and death.

“My experience of visiting people in the hospitals reminded me of the very first moment when I was seriously thinking about the priesthood – in the hospital for the lepers,” said Deacon Nguyen, who hopes to invite more young people into church ministry at his first priestly assignment at St. Ann.

 “When there are young people serving during Mass, the other young people in the pews will say, ‘If my friend does it, I can do it, too!’”