HANOI - A building which once housed the Pope’s representative in Vietnam but was confiscated by the country’s Communist government will be returned to the Church after a decades-long struggle. The turnaround is the result of a renewed campaign of prayer, public processions, and constant vigil (during the coldest winter in forty years) by Vietnamese Catholics. The building had been converted to governmental use.
The growing size of the protests caused embarassment for Vietnam’s secular communist government, and were only stopped when His Grace Joseph Ngo Quang Kiet, Archbishop of Hanoi, announced to the assembled faithful that the government had indeed promised to hand back the property.