By Anthony Barich
SISTER Thanh Catherine of Divine Mercy made her final, Solemn Profession at the Carmelite monastery in Nedlands on 11 December, having escaped Vietnam where her family was persecuted for their Catholic faith.
The Solemn Profession represented a boom in Religious life generated in countries where Catholics are persecuted for their faith, yet benefit the life of the Church in Australia.
The Carmelite monastery in Nedlands has 13 fully professed Sisters, one postulant and another Vietnamese woman who has taken her first vows.
Present for the Solemn Profession were many Religious Sisters, including young Vietnamese Sisters from other Orders – one of whom took her final vows last year in Vietnam in a group of 15.
Sr Thanh, 30, born in Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon), is the second-youngest of 10 children still living. One, the oldest brother, disappeared after trying to escape the atheist Communist country years ago.
Archbishop Barry Hickey, the principal celebrant of the Mass with Carmelite and Vietnamese priests to celebrate the Solemn Profession, said her family was persecuted back in Vietnam.
But, for Sr Thanh, “it’s a painful experience that I don’t want to talk about”, she told The Record.
Archbishop Hickey said the Vietnamese priests concelebrating the Mass – including Fr Hong Pham who was imprisoned for 10 years as a De La Salle Brother in Vietnam for refusing to renounce his faith – are evidence that God’s will is always done, even through “a long journey through persecution and unforeseen circumstances”.
Sr Thanh’s family left for Finland when she was 14 before some of them migrated to Australia. Others went to England and Canada. After studying accounting at TAFE and working in two fruit and vegetable stores run by her family and friends in Maddington and in Subiaco respectively, she entered the Carmel of the Most Holy Trinity in Nedlands, aged 24.
“My parents, especially my mum, would’ve liked me to become a Religious, but as a young woman at that time, I didn’t like to listen to her – (I’d think) ‘rubbish, I’m going to enjoy my life’,” Sr Thanh recalled to The Record.
“I said to myself if ‘I follow her advice, when there is a stage in my life that if I didn’t go well and get out of the vocation I’d blame her as she wanted me to be in here’. I don’t like to be pushed into a particular vocation.”
She would only enter a convent on her own terms, she said. That way, “in the future if I have a problem or difficulty I can say ‘I made the decision, so I’ll stay as someone didn’t make the decision for me’.”
Sr Thanh said she felt “a stirring deep down” in her heart while living in the world “as a normal woman”, during which time she realised that everything in the world has an end, and she realised she was searching for something “everlasting”.
“The answer for the everlasting is God,” she said. That, and the fact that “I’m not a very active person, so I could do (a life of prayer)”, she joked.
The Archbishop thanked the Vietnamese Catholic community for nurturing the faith of its youth so they can hear and respond to God’s call. Sr Thanh said that, as a teenager, it integrated family and community effectively.
Her life has been rooted in the faith because of her family environment that nurtured prayer.
“When I was born, (family) teaching is rooted in that faith: you know there is God, who you lean on to make personal decisions and are able to listen on a deeper level,” she said. Her whole neighbourhood were Catholics, so faith was learned in a community, just as it is nurtured in the Vietnamese Catholic Community in Perth.
This upbringing also kept her grounded as a teen living in Finland, which “is not a Catholic country”; and the family had to travel far just to attend Mass once a month.
Archbishop Hickey said the Vietnamese Catholic Community’s role in nurturing the faith was all the more important as “we live in a time where society rejects God and people make strong arguments against His very existence.
Yet there are those, he said, who give an admirable defence of God, and espouse the fact that humans are not mere accidents of evolution but of a process started by God.
“We’re not about proving the existence of God, but experiencing God in our lives, discovering how He speaks to our hearts; realising how the presence of God in our lives is as real as this chapel,” he said.
Sr Thanh’s Solemn Profession “touches the very centre of the faith, as it’s about a special intimacy to which God has called us – a special commitment characterised by prayer, commitment and self-sacrifice”.
This vocation is given to few, but has a long history in the Church, and even existed before the Church’s foundation in the Old Testament, the prelate said, as presented in the First Reading from the prophet Hosea where the Lord said:
“I am going to lure her and lead her out into the wilderness and speak to her heart. I will betroth you to myself forever, betroth you with integrity and justice, with tenderness and love.
“I will betroth you to myself with faithfulness, and you will come to know the Lord.”
This prayer, silence and intimacy of God is possible because God became Man in Jesus Christ, Archbishop Hickey said.
It is because of this intimate relationship, and this reality of God in our lives, that “we are here” celebrating the Mass for the Sister’s Solemn Profession,” Archbishop Hickey added.