ASIA/VIETNAM - HE WAS A DOCTOR FOR LEPERS THEN HE ASKED HIMSELF, BESIDES CURING DISEASE HOW COULD HE TREAT SOLITUDE? TODAY HE IS A PRIEST

Tuesday, 6 May 2003

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Hanoi (Fides Service) – Ten years ago he was a doctor, today he is a priest, but his life is still a service to the poor, the marginalised, the terminally ill, anyone needing material assistance and moral and spiritual comfort.
Doctor Augustinius Nguyen Viet Chung, aged 48, a doctor in Ho Chi Minh City, encountered the Catholic faith ten years ago and after appropriate path of spiritual and theological formation he was ordained a priest on 25 March this year, the Feast of the Annunciation, at the church of Our Lady of Perpetual Succour in Ho Chi Minh in southern Vietnam. The ordination Mass was presided by auxiliary Bishop Joseph Vu Duy Thong of Ho Chi Minh, in the presence of 60 people including Father Chung’s relations and a number of religious men and women.
Many Sisters of Charity of St Vincent de Paul who know Doctor Chung and have worked with him, say “God’s grace works miracles: he is no ordinary doctor and at the age of 40 he changed his life and decided to offer it completely to the Lord”.
Father Chung says he was drawn to study medicine at the sight of a foreign missionary who devoted his life to caring for lepers. After obtaining his degree and specialising in skin diseases, he worked at the Ben San state hospital where they were some Vicentian Sisters. Father Chung says: “Working as a doctor I said to myself: I am able to cure their disease but how can I cure their solitude and sense of being abandoned? Then I encountered the Catholic faith and I found the doctor of souls, Jesus Christ”.
Father Chung was baptised in 1994 and fours months later he entered the Vincentian Congregation. “For my conversion – he concludes – the example of the Vicentian Sisters was very important: their dedication and love for lepers spoke to my heart”. Today Father Chung works at the Centre for terminally ill run by the Sisters in the Cu Chi district some 45 km from Ho Chi Minh City.
The Vincentian congregation arrived in Vietnam in 1954 and at present has 13 priests, 12 deacons and 43 seminarians in the country working in evangelisation among ethnic minority groups and service of the poor and the sick. PA (Fides Service 6/5/2003 EM lines 31 Words: 409)