Notre-Dame Cathedral Basilica of Saigon

Image: Wikimedia Commons

In the middle of the roaring traffic of Vietnam's largest city, two red-brick towers rise 58 meters over a square where, day and night, people stop before a white marble statue of the Virgin. The cathedral was built between 1877 and 1880, its materials shipped from France, and its red bricks have kept their color unfaded through nearly a century and a half of tropical sun and monsoon. Officially the Cathedral Basilica of Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception, it took its familiar name in 1959, when the statue of Our Lady of Peace was set before it, Vietnam entrusting itself to Mary in an anxious hour; on Sundays crowds spill from its Masses onto Paris Commune Square. For Vietnamese Catholics, one of Asia's largest and most fervent Catholic communities, forged through persecutions that produced more than a hundred canonized martyrs, this cathedral is more than a colonial monument: it is the mother church of a faith that took root in this land four centuries ago and never let go.