St. Cecilia church celebrates Toronto’s Vietnamese heritage
Bright shafts of sunlight flood through stained glass windows, splashing a golden hue on the rose-coloured walls of St. Cecilia’s Catholic Church.
Parishioners file in from the Sunday morning cold as the choir sings gospeltinged oldies from up in the second-floor balcony.
Father Joseph Tap Tran takes the pulpit, leads the church in its prayers.
He came to Canada in 1982, a refugee from postwar Vietnam, one of the socalled “boat people.”
He’s delivering mass in English now.
In two hours, he’ll start over again, but in Vietnamese, with Vietnamese prayers and a Vietnamese choir, singing traditional Vietnamese hymns.
St. Cecilia’s, wedged between High Park and the Junction in west Toronto, is home to separate English and Vietnamese parishes.
For over 11 years, Tran has delivered masses to each one, each weekend.
Each pew has one English bible, one Vietnamese.
“That’s Canada, I think,” Tran says. “Our diversity.”
More than 70,000 Torontonians say they have Vietnamese heritage. More than 45,000 of them list Vietnamese as their mother tongue.
St. Cecilia’s has become a major hub for the GTA’s Vietnamese-speaking Catholic population.
“It’s the main church for the Vietnamese community,” says Michael Huynh, a Vietnam-born parishioner who has attended St. Cecilia’s for more than 18 years.
He and his family live in Mississauga, a 40-minute drive from the church.
Other Vietnamese-speaking parishioners come in from Barrie, Orillia, Milton, to worship in their native language.
“I’ve seen four generations there,” Huynh says. “(Refugees) that came here by boat and Canadian-Vietnamese that are born here. The heritage is there.”
The services at St. Cecilia’s help preserve Vietnamese heritage for younger generations, Huynh says.
His young children attend Vietnamese mass each week and take Vietnamese classes at the church on Saturdays.
“To keep your mother tongue is very important and the mass in Vietnamese and the Vietnamese school keeps (kids) in line with the language,” Huynh says.
“Along with that, they learn Vietnamese culture, even though some of them have never seen Vietnam.”
St. Cecilia’s has stood for over a century and, for generations, was primarily an Irish Catholic Church, led by priests with names such as Gallagher, Cullinane, McGrath.
In the late 1970s and ’80s, in the wake of the Vietnam War, tens of thousands of Vietnamese refugees arrived in Canada, many of them sponsored by churches and religious groups of all denominations in the GTA.
A Vietnamese parish was set up nearby and, in 1993, it moved to St. Cecilia’s.
“Having the Vietnamese parish really helped save the church,” says Luke Stocking, a St. Cecilia’s parishioner since 2010 and chair of the English parish’s pastoral council.
“It was an influx of a very strong, vibrant community into the building, at a time when the English parish was dwindling.”
St. Cecilia’s three English masses typically see a combined 500 to 600 attendees, Tran says. The three Vietnamese services can get up to 2,000.
The two parishes worship separately, but they come together often.
“You get these insights into the particularities of Vietnamese Catholic culture,” Stocking says. “I find that I have a better appreciation of the beauty of the diversity of the Catholic Church.”
Mass is now delivered in at least 35 languages each week, in churches across the GTA, says Neil McCarthy, spokesperson for the Catholic Archdiocese of Toronto
“We have a lot of immigrants who come to Canada who are active in their faith,” he says. “They’re the ones who are really involved in the churches, too.”
At St. Cecilia’s, the English and Vietnamese communities put up the church’s holiday decorations together. They share in each other’s special events.
The English-speaking parishioners invite the Vietnamese to their St. Patrick’s Day celebrations. The Vietnamese invite the English-speakers to Tet, the Vietnamese New Year.
“By communication, by working together, by inviting each other to the celebrations, they learn what we are and, in return, we know what they are,” Huynh says.
“We get to know each other and we can talk.”