Yesterday, Phuong Nga Hillenbrand, our close friend of many, many years, forwarded to us an extraordinary letter from a Vietnamese priest to President Trump. As a young person, Father Chuong Hoai Nguyen was among the hundreds of thousands of “boat people” risking their lives as refugees and grateful for the asylum to be found in the United States. In his letter he describes his decades of work to “make America great.” 

You can find the letter here. Please read it all the way to the end. The last paragraphs are unforgettable.

Peter Steinfels, a former editor of Commonweal and religion writer for the New York Times, is a University Professor Emeritus at Fordham University and author of A People Adrift: The Crisis of the Roman Catholic Church in America.

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