ST. JOSEPH'S CATHEDRAL

Dedicated to Saint Joseph, protector of the Tonkin vicariate, it was consecrated during a ceremony celebrated on Christmas night 1886. It was built in the neo-Gothic style according to plans drawn up by Monsignor Paul-François Puginier, Vicar of West Tonkin. Pragmatic, he financed the construction through the organization of a lottery. The cathedral was built on the ashes of the former imperial monastery of Gratitude to Heaven (Bao Thien) which dated from the Ly dynasty (11th and 12th centuries) and was destroyed by the French in 1883. In its massive, fortified appearance - the novelist Albert de Pouvourville (1861-1939) refers to it as "a masterpiece of grandeur and ugliness" - the cathedral retains the memory of persecutions and times when evangelization was a dangerous and clandestine enterprise. Originally, the building had no stained glass windows. The chevet, facing west, in the direction of Christ's tomb, is now adorned with a triple glass window celebrating the Virgin. At its feet, Théophane Vénard (1829-1861), a priest of the Foreign Missions of Paris, who entered Tonkin clandestinely in 1854, was captured and beheaded in 1861. He was canonized in 1988 by Pope John Paul II. The cathedral perpetuates the memory of martyrs, such as Father André Tran An Dung Lac (1795-1839), a Vietnamese priest executed by beheading under the reign of Emperor Minh Mang, whose relics are kept in a chapel. On November 24, the feast of St. Andrew-Dung-Lac, also commemorates all the martyrs of Vietnam from 1625 to 1886. From 1956 to 1975, the cathedral was both looted and abandoned. It has been renovated and, although some stained glass windows have been refurbished, it no longer has the character it had in the Indochina era. On Sundays, it is advisable to go to the cathedral around 6:30 pm to appreciate the extraordinary vitality of Vietnamese Catholicism. Relations between Catholics (about 7% of the population) and the party-state remain tense. According to Cardinal Pierre Nguyen Van Nhon (elevated to the cardinal's purple by Pope Francis in January 2015), "In the big cities of Vietnam, things are going pretty well between our faithful and the government. In the remote provinces, it's a different story: sometimes parish meetings are not allowed because the local authorities want to take things in hand. In addition, we would like to recover the church property confiscated after the communist takeover in the North (1954) and in the South (1975).