As faithful readers of this blog know, I have many times had posts about heroic Catholic Chaplains serving in our military. A man whose courage beggared description is Servant of God and Medal of Honor recipient Vincent J. Capodanno, known as the Grunt Padre. I am not ready yet to do a full post on him, wishing to do him justice, but a recent news story in The National Catholic Register caught my eye:
Go here to read the rest. There will come a day when Vietnam will be free. Let us pray to Our Lady of La Vang and Servant of God Vincent Capodanno to intercede with God that this day will come soon.
God bless Father Capodanno!
I wonder if the good Padre would have a chance for a Medal of Honor, these days, were he to do the dame things now, he did then. I doubt it. He lived in a different world back then. Wonderful man and priest.
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Good story. A Vietnamese bishop saying a Mass in DaNang for an American GI Chaplain.
Go tell the New York Times.
For several years, our parish had with us a Vietnamese priest. I would often think I would go to him and tell him how sorry I am we didn’t save his country.
I never did it. It would not have done either of us any good.
I have often wondered if Vietnam could be considered a protracted battle from which we retreated while on the way to winning the Cold War. If the country had stayed truly Communist, it would much more resemble North Korea or Cuba than it does. There are high-end luxury hotels in Saigon (it’s only officially called “Ho Chi Minh City”) and shops to go with them, a thriving textile industry and there’s even a McDonalds slated to come in soon. This is not the legacy of a Soviet-style “liberation.” In an almost laughable twist, the largest stock exchange in Vietnam is named after Ho Chi Minh.
If one must still refer to Vietnam as a “communist” nation, then it is a Chinese-style communism, which isn’t really communism at all as much as it is fascism; a system much more suited to the current American landscape.
So long as the U.S. maintained pressure for reform on Ha Noi, Viet Nam steadily eased the repression and opened up. Ha Noi looked to the US as a bulwark against China and was ready to do anything the US desired short of the rulers losing their jobs i.e. real elections and the like. Clinton and Bush maintained that pressure (restrictions against Catholics were lifted in 2005) and even speech became much freer in ups and downs.With the current President the pressure to reform is gone. The repression is settling back in though Catholics are fighting back and winning sometimes. The Cardinal is a brave man and respected by Buddhists and Christians alike.