Refugee priest help found Hawaii’s Vietnamese Catholic Community
Father Joseph Truong Ky, a seminary professor and Vietnam refugee who helped establish Hawaii’s Vietnamese Catholic Community, died Dec. 30 at Mercy McCune Brooks Hospital in Carthage, Missouri. He was 89 years old and a priest for 59 years.
Father Ky was a member of the Sulpicians, a society of diocesan priests who teach in seminaries.
Father Ky was born March 6, 1929, in Vietnam’s HaNam Province, one of four children of Truong Giap and Nguyen La.
He was educated in the minor seminary of Hanoi from 1945 to 1950 and then at the Sulpician Seminaries in Hanoi, Vinh Long, and Saigon from 1951 to 1958. He was ordained on June 6, 1959, for the Diocese of Cantho, Vietnam, and began teaching at the Cantho Seminary in South Vietnam.
In 1967, he joined the Sulpicians for the Province of France in 1967 and taught at St. Sulpice Seminary of Vinh Long, South Vietnam from 1967 to 1968. He earned a master’s degree in comparative religion at the Institut Catholique de Paris in 1971 and a master’s in sociology at the Université de Paris the next year. During this time, he also earned a diploma in Chinese Mandarin at the École Nationale des Langues Orientales.
He returned to Vietnam in 1972 to teach at the St. Sulpice Seminary of Danang.
After the fall of Saigon in 1975, Father Ky as a refugee came to Honolulu where Bishop John J. Scanlan assigned him as chaplain for the Vietnamese refugees. In that role, he helped to establish the Vietnamese Catholic Community in Hawaii. He served as associate pastor at Sacred Heart Church, Honolulu, from 1975 to 1980 and then at the Co-Cathedral of St. Theresa from 1980 to 1982.
He was incardinated into the Diocese of Honolulu on May 8, 1979.
Father Ky then was assigned to St. Joseph College in Mountain View, California, where he served as the ethnic advisor to the seminary community and to Vietnamese refugees. He also taught philosophy, comparative religion, and Vietnamese literature until the college closed in 1992.
Father Ky requested early retirement for health reasons and went to the Vietnamese retirement community of the Congregation of the Mother of the Redeemer in Carthage, Missouri. There he continued to work for the Vietnamese community as a spiritual adviser and through the publication of several books, a Chinese-English lexicon, and articles in the monthly magazine, “Forum of the People of God” (“Dien Dan Giao Dan”).
He was officially transferred from the Sulpician province of France to the U.S. province on Nov. 15, 2014.
Father Ky is buried in Park Cemetery, Carthage, the cemetery of the monastery of the Congregation of the Mother of the Redeemer.
