…in Australia

SIGN in English and Vietnamese outside St John the Evangelist Catholic Church in East Melbourne lists times for Mass (gio le) on weekdays (ngay trong tuan) and weekends (cuoituan).

The first words from the Gospel of St John on an archway of the ornate, high-ceiling church in Victoria Road — "Verbum Caro Factum Est Et Habitavit In Nobis" — are in Latin.

The description on a painting of 117 Vietnamese saints is in Vietnamese, Spanish and French. In a small container on the altar is a relic from the shoulderblade of the only female among them, 18th-century saint Agnes Le Thi Thinh.

"My baptismal name is Joseph, my mother called me Tien, my middle name is Duc and my surname is Bui," says the priest. Almost 30 years have passed since he was among 14 fugitives who fled from near Saigon in a fishing boat. The vast majority of his 820 parishioners are of Vietnamese heritage.

"The Australian people, they know me as Father Joe; the Vietnamese call me Father Tien," says the 56-year-old clergyman, cited among about 100 by an RMIT academic who says Vietnamese priests in Australia are growing in number and proportion and that "the future will no longer be a church strongly dominated by the descendants of the Irish Catholic pioneers but may become over time … dominated by the Vietnamese and the other ethnic communities".