ARTICLES

After initial heartbreak, priest still serves the Vietnamese

by Jean Denton
Special to The Catholic Virginian

Retired Father John Duhaime chatted amiably with Father John Prinelli after a Mass last month celebrating the 30th anniversary of the latter’s ordination.

Complimenting his friend on the beautiful liturgy offered in three languages, Fr. Duhaime said he particularly enjoyed the lilting cadence of Vietnamese, and thought he’d like to see the script and try it himself sometime.

“You have to be careful, John, you don’t want to embarrass yourself,” Fr. Prinelli joked. “You could easily say some not-very-nice words by mistake.”

Fr. Prinelli himself doesn’t have to worry about misspeaking, however, because he is well practiced having presided at the monthly Vietnamese Mass in Roanoke for the last 10 years.

One might not expect a New Jersey-born son of Italian-American parents to be the primary priest serving a Vietnamese immigrant community. But fluent in their native language, Fr. Prinelli is beloved by the Roanoke area Vietnamese Catholic families. His ministry also includes visiting the sick and elderly and officiating at weddings, baptisms and funerals.

It’s obvious their affection is mutual, as the priest expressed his joy in being able to serve the spiritual needs of a people and culture he fell in love with some 45 years ago.

Fr. Prinelli is pastor of Holy Family Parish in Pearisburg and Holy Spirit Parish in Christiansburg, but drives an hour to Roanoke one Sunday every month for the 4 p.m. Vietnamese Mass at St. Andrew Church.

While he is gratified by his close relationship with the Vietnamese community over the last decade, Fr. Prinelli recalled it was a long time coming.

Having known he wanted to be a priest since he was five years old, Fr. Prinelli graduated from Seton Hall University with a degree in classical languages. Shortly afterward, in the early 1960s, he enlisted in the Army and was sent to Vietnam.

While serving in Tuy Hoa and Phu Hiep he had several military assignments, but much of his duty involved coordinating with local nuns to provide meals in camps for persons displaced by the war.

In the process, “I fell in love with the people and especially their religious practice,” he remembered.

After he was discharged from the Army, he made several trips back to Vietnam to visit and soon requested to study for the priesthood there. In 1969, he said, Bishop Francis Xavier Thuan finally accepted him as a seminarian for the Diocese of Nha Trang in central Vietnam.

There he spent several years of enculturation, learning the language and working for the diocese serving the poor — including several trips back to the U.S. to raise funds for church sponsored orphanages.

Bishop Thuan had insisted that the future priest go to Rome for his theological studies, and so, having achieved proficiency in Vietnamese, he was sent there in 1974 expecting to return to Vietnam for ordination.

But while he was in Rome, the war ended, the church was suppressed by the new Vietnamese government and Bishop Thuan was imprisoned (for 13 years, it turned out).

“So he couldn’t call me into the priesthood, and in my third year of studies I found myself with no bishop,” Fr. Prinelli recalled.

The late Msgr. Charles Kelly, then vice-rector of the Pontifical North American College in Rome, suggested he contact Bishop Walter F. Sullivan and he was accepted in the Diocese of Richmond. He was ordained a priest Aug. 12, 1978.

Prior to that, it was a tough time for Fr. Prinelli.

“When Vietnam closed, I had no desire to go anywhere else,” he recollected, explaining that he had intended to live and serve the rest of his life in Vietnam.

He said he was naturally attracted to the Vietnamese spirituality.

“It’s very devotional, inclined to veneration of the Blessed Virgin and the saints and devotion to the Blessed Sacrament and Eucharist,” he noted. “It reminded me very much of the Italian-American culture I grew up in.”

Bishop Sullivan had planned for Fr. Prinelli to serve the Vietnamese people who had come to the diocese, but in the early years after the war it was difficult for many refugees to relate to an American priest.

So Fr. Prinelli served in several parishes in the diocese and only once in his first 20 years as a priest did he celebrate Mass in Vietnamese — in 1979 when he was invited to Holy Cross Church in Lynchburg by Fr. Scott Duarte, then parochial vicar, to celebrate the lunar New Year with the local Vietnamese community. About 600 people were at the Mass.

Nevertheless he was disappointed that his desire to regularly minister to the Vietnamese people could not be realized.

“It was a real heartbreak,” he remembered.

Then in 1998, shortly after Fr. Prinelli was assigned to the Giles County churches, a “friend of a friend” who knew about his Vietnamese background told members of the Roanoke Vietnamese community about him and they invited him to their monthly Mass. He went.

At the time, a Vietnamese priest from West Virginia was presiding. For six months Fr. Prinelli attended the Vietnamese Mass, and although he was invited to concelebrate a few times “I didn’t push, I kept low-key,” he explained.

Soon the Vietnamese priest was assigned farther away in his own diocese and he was unable to make the monthly trip to Roanoke.

“When he missed, they asked me to celebrate the Mass for them,” Fr. Prinelli said, remembering both his excitement and his apprehension since it had been so long since he’d said Mass in Vietnamese.

“I prayed, oh, I prayed,” he said, “but once I started it rolled right out, and you should have seen their faces.”

A people and their priest had found each other. So began a friendship and shared ministry that has blossomed during the last 10 years.

“He came at a time when we needed a Vietnamese-speaking priest,” said Kim Huynh, a leader of the Vietnamese Catholic community in Roanoke.

Fr. Prinelli estimates about 100 attend the monthly Mass.

“But Fr. John has always been very willing and he really takes care of our tiny community,” Ms. Huynh said.

She noted that he and St. Andrew’s pastor Msgr. Thomas Miller also help the community find Vietnamese priests who can come on occasion to give additional retreats and spiritual enrichment.

“Our relationship is very tight, very close with him,” Ms. Huynh explained. “People see he is willing to do anything for us and that makes him very special. We love him dearly.

“Today he’s just one of us. He does all kinds of things with us: he talks with us, he eats our food. We don’t even look at him as an American. In fact, no one calls him Father John or Father Prinelli. To us he is ‘Cha Hoa,’” she said.

An example of his dedication, she added, was when her own mother was dying. “Toward the end, he would drive all the way from Pearisburg to come and sit with the family — all day. And not just once, several times,” she recalled.

For his part, Fr. Prinelli said saying the Mass in Vietnamese — particularly for the older people who don’t speak English, “is a very happy and consoling part of my ministry.”

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