6/365 Remnant

Yet I will leave a remnant (Ez 6:8)

I don't know the whole story. Some is speculation and some is fact and some is a mix of the two. But sometime in the 80s, my area of town had a huge influx of Vietnamese immigrants. My parish (remember, this is before my time) was small and rather white. We either welcomed the Vietnamese or we wound up with them. I'd like to think the former. Probably. Suddenly our parish was very Vietnamese. Readings were said in Vietnamese and then in English. At one point there was a separate mass in Vietnamese.

Time passed.

At some point in the 90s, but still before I got to the parish in 1998, the Vietnamese appealed to the bishop to have their own parish. They were given St. Thomas of Aquin down further south of us. But since there was no school there, our parish school remained about half Vietnamese. When I arrived at the parish, and soon after, the school, the feeling at our church was still one of a strong Vietnamese presence. The readings were all in English but the names on the prayers for the sick list were a mix. The school still took a day off at Tet. Those sorts of things.

The school merged with another Catholic school further east and moved its campus. I don't know what the demographics are now. I do know there are fewer Vietnamese at church on any given Sunday. St. Thomas of Aquin has closed, but they are now centered at Resurrection Parish. I don't know what their numbers are, but here there is only a remnant remaining, a few families of former schoolchildren.

At the migration mass on Sunday, though, the second reading was read in Vietnamese. At the end of readings, a Vietnamese reader will sing something that must be the equivalent of "the Word of the Lord." It asks for a response in the same melody, same tongue, but of course hardly anybody in the congregation knows how to do it. On Sunday, the reader did this same ending and I held my breath up in the choir loft. There below me on the St. Joseph side of the church came the sung response. That's where the few Vietnamese parishioners traditionally sit. The younger generation folk who were upstairs with me (also coming in right at 10) did not respond. I don't know if Thuy at 21 knows much Vietnamese anymore beyond conversation, for instance. But the older generation downstairs in the back replied to the reader and then she said the same ending in English: The Word of the Lord. We all replied: Thanks be to God.

It is often said that our parish is stronger because of our diversity. It's almost as if we have to say that. Never that it is a struggle to combine two disparate cultures (or three or four). Never that some of them would really rather have their own church with their own traditions--Americans and Vietnamese, frankly. But I think it does make something stronger to have different people in the pews with you. I think the remnant that does remain--either Vietnamese or Eritrean or Nigerian or Irish-from-way-back-baptized-in-this-parish or yuppie couples or gay men or converts or whatever demographic category you want to put yourself in--does make the experience stronger and deeper for all.

Sometimes, like Sunday, our parish is overwhelmingly what it is. We are sometimes more like what we are than we really are. Other times, we are a shadow of that, with only a few Vietnamese folks on the right hand side, a handful of other immigrants scattered throughout the nave, some school families, a few old die-hards, new people who joined with our pastor, the choir...but this remnant, too, of our best moments, remains, so that it can be added onto as we build up the city of God.