To Slidell and the Catholic Church, by way of Guangzhou

Where else but in America could a mother and father in their 30s from mainland China arrive with two young children, eventually stumble across a Catholic church one evening in Slidell, begin taking instructions in the faith with the assistance of a Chinese compendium of the catechism provided by the Vatican website and learn how to navigate their language gap and persevere in their faith journey with the translation help of a Vietnamese Catholic who knows Mandarin Chinese?
 

“This is a great sign of the universal church,” said Hoang Pham, the Vietnamese parishioner at St. Margaret Mary Church in Slidell whose knowledge of Mandarin has eased the path of a family into the United Nations of all Easter Vigils on Saturday night, April 11 (if the coronavirus allows). “We are all from different cultures, languages and customs – Vietnamese, Chinese, English – but we all have the same faith.”
 

A brief roster and scorecard may be helpful at this point:
 

Chuang Wen Zhong, the husband, was baptized in the underground Catholic Church near Guangzhou, a sprawling port city located 81 miles northwest of Hong Kong. He speaks virtually no English.
 

Chuang’s wife, Xuefang Xu, 36, speaks much better English, having learned it in school, but she has not been baptized or received any of the church’s sacraments.
 

Yuqing Zhong, nicknamed Bella, is a breezy 6-year-old who has taught her mother a few English idioms, such as how to be “a rotten egg.” She is not.
 

Yilang Zhong, 3, likes to climb rocks at the Our Lady of Lourdes grotto at St. Margaret Mary. He is nicknamed Elon.
Katherine O’Hanlon is the awestruck coordinator of St. Margaret Mary’s RCIA program, and Marianne Bell is the equally dumbfounded director of religious education.
 

It takes a village.
 

“They are very, very nice,” Xuefang, the young mother, said of the parishioners she has encountered thus far. “I met a lot of people here, and it feels good. I have new friends.”
 

Bell said she first ran into Xuefang several months ago as she was walking through the parish Evangelization Center one evening, looking lost.
 

“She looked puzzled,” Bell said.
 

Xuefang told Bell she was looking for the parish “Bible study,” which she had heard about. “She told me, ‘I just want to know more about the Catholic Church,’” Bell recalled.
 

After determining that Xuefang had never been baptized – and feeling she spoke English well enough to understand – Bell suggested she sign up for the RCIA program and enroll her children in the parish school of religion.
It wasn’t until much later that Bell found out that Chuang, her/ husband, had been baptized in an underground Catholic church.
 

That’s when Bell got on the phone with the Office of Religious Education and pleaded: “Find me somebody in the archdiocese who speaks Mandarin so we can work with the husband.”
 

Bell has two friends who live in Vancouver, British Columbia, who can speak fluent Mandarin, and they exchanged a few phone calls with Chuang and pointed the St. Margaret Mary RCIA teachers to the Vatican website, which has a Mandarin-language option.
 

Still, Bell wanted a local person to help the family more directly.
“We have this precious young man in this parish who is from Vietnam, and he wanders in one day and says, ‘I can help her and her husband. I speak Mandarin, too,’” Bell said. “I went, ‘Oh my gosh, right here in our backyard we have somebody who speaks Mandarin who also just loves the church.’ He and the husband have been having these ongoing conversations.”
That led to Chuang, with translation assistance of Hoang from Vietnam, making his first confession and first holy Communion a few weeks ago.
 

The Chinese family came to Slidell because Xuefang’s sister and brother-in-law, who is an American, own rental property there. They gave the couple the job of managing the tenants and taking care of the apartments.
 

As the RCIA program evolved, Xuefang shared how she feels blessed that Elon was born. From 1979 to 2015, China had a one-child policy, but rural parents were “allowed” to have a second child if their first child was a girl.
When Elon was born, he had some serious medical complications that hospitalized him for a long time before he was able to come home.
 

“We didn’t know the problem until he was coming out,” Xuefang said. “God blessed (us). I always think he is a gift from God because of the difficulties I had to have him.”
 

At the Easter Vigil, Xuefang, Bella and Elon will be baptized, and Xuefang will be confirmed and receive Communion for the first time. Bella will make her first Communion next year as a second grader.
 

For now, the process has been almost as overwhelming as it is for Xuefang to explain what her studies over the last several months have revealed to her as the most important aspects of the Catholic faith.
 

“Peaceful … blessing … forgive,” she said. “I don’t know how to explain it.”
Her husband, Chuang, may speak only a few words of English, but he tells Xuefang in his native Mandarin about how he feels whenever he goes inside a church and sits down.
 

“Every time he stays in the church he feels so comfortable,” Xuefang said. “He has different feelings, but the main feeling is that he feels comfortable. For me, when I face something, now I know who I can pray to. I know who I can talk to. That is totally different from before, I mean, when I had nothing of faith.”
 

Peter Finney Jr. can be reached at [email protected].