Meet Father Nen of Kontum

If you’ve spent much time on this website, you’d know that I get a big buzz chatting to the elderly as I travel around Vietnam. These people have seen so much and are usually friendly and approachable. And very often, their excellent health as they advance in years is also amazing. During my recent visit to Kontum in Vietnam’s central highlands, one of the most spectacular buildings we encountered was the French era seminary. While there, I got to spend some time talking with Father Nen, a retired priest who’s spent most of his life working in the ethnic minority parishes of the area. Father Nen speaks perfect French and several ethnic minority languages - but no English. In his 94 years, he’s witnessed French rule, Japanese rule, the return of the French, the arrival and departure of the Americans and the arrival of the communists.That’s a lot of history for one person to digest. Father Nen trained with the MEP, Paris Foreign Missions Society, in Saigon. MEP is an order with a big presence in Vietnam. Whatever your view of the Catholic Church’s complicated history here, the story of missionaries heading out to these remote provinces in the mid 19th century, before French colonisation, with a Bible and little else, is extraordinary. At that time, this area was only inhabited by ethnic minorities. That these missionaries were so successful in their missionary campaign, with such modest resources, is almost incomprehensible. Later, the protection of missionaries and catholics became the pretext for deeper French intervention in Vietnam. I often wonder what kind of message it was that these missionaries were delivering? And how it was that local people, were so amenable to it? These days, the church is a very firm fixture in these parts, from towns like Kontum to the tiny surrounding minority villages, there seem to be churches large and small, everywhere.