WASHINGTON (DC)
The New York Times
By NEELA BANERJEE
Published: December 11, 2005
WASHINGTON, Dec. 8 - When the Rev. Augustine Tran went to Vietnamese-American parishes as a seminarian a couple of years ago, pastors and worshipers would hand him money to help him with school, though they had little of their own. When he goes to the Vietnamese enclaves of suburban Virginia, where he now works, Roman Catholics often greet him like a celebrity, his siblings said.
At a time when fewer American Catholics are expressing interest in the priesthood, Vietnamese-American men are an anomaly. They are now the second-largest minority ethnic group in seminaries, only slightly behind Hispanics, who account for a far larger percentage of the general population.
While church experts and priests say that some Catholics frown upon their sons' joining the priesthood and are even embarrassed by it in the wake of the sex abuse scandals among members of the clergy, Vietnamese Catholics continue to hold the priesthood in high regard. They say that the sex scandal marred individual clergymen but not the vocation itself.