New Redemptorist ‘comes home’ to southwest Kansas

The newest priest to join the Redemptorist Hispanic Missionary Team in Liberal, Father Tuan was reared in the then-small town of Nampa, a cCatholic identity remains strong in schools, despite lack of Religiousity near Boise, Idaho, but since joining the Redemptorist order in 1986, he has studied and worked in cities ranging from San Francisco to Berkeley, and from Chicago to Minneapolis.

"The Diocese of Dodge City kind of reminds me of the diocese my family came out of, the Diocese of Boise," he said. "The entire state is one diocese. There were small towns everywhere. The whole sense of a small, one-church town has always been what I know. So, when I came here it felt like I was returning back home – small communities where people really get to know each other."

Father Tuan comes to Liberal on the heels of the departure of Father Patrick Keyes, C.Ss.R., St. Anthony Church pastor, who recently accepted a position in Missouri. Father Tuan will live in community with Redemptorist Fathers Tony Judge and Mike McAndrew, Brother Larry Lujan, and Father John Fahey-Guerra, with whom he attended the novitiate.

"I thought it would be a new and interesting adventure, something that I had asked for and wanted to do for a long time," he said. "I knew what the Redemptorists were doing here, working with the Hispanic culture. It reflected a lot of where the Church is moving. I finally have the opportunity to learn some Spanish and be immersed in the community."

His immediate goal is to master the Spanish language.

"I know enough Spanish to get into trouble," he said, laughing. "Now I need to learn enough to get me out."

Father Tuan, his mother and father and four siblings moved from his native Vietnam to Idaho in 1975 when he was 8 years old. He said his parents taught him the value of not taking for granted the opportunities offered in their new country, and of making the right choices. Father Tuan would like to impart that same lesson to those he serves in southwest Kansas.

"I am a minority in one sense, and I know how it is coming from another country into America," he said. "It’s the land of opportunity, the land of choices."

Father Tuan, the son of Khuong and Tuan Pham, was born in 1967 in Sai Gon, Vietnam. He joined the Redemptorist order soon after his high school graduation, and eventually earned a degree in psychology while at the Redemptorist Formation Program in San Francisco. He entered the novitiate program in St. Louis in 1991, and later studied theology and philosophy at the Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology at Berkeley.

He then studied at the Catholic Theological Union in Chicago, before going to Thailand from 1995-97, for two years of pastoral experience.

"There I had the opportunity to experience first hand the work of the Redemptorists in foreign ministry," he said in an article in the Idaho Catholic Register. "I taught catechism in a parish in Bangkok and in an international school in Bangkok."

Father Tuan was ordained June 26, 1999. He served as parish priest at St. Mary of the Assumption Parish in Whittier, Calif. until August 2002, and then at St. Alphonsus Parish in Minneapolis, until recently moving to Liberal.