Thanh Thai Nguyen
Thanh Thai Nguyen was born in Nha Trang, Vietnam, on April 7, 1953, the second oldest of 11 children. He entered St. Joseph Seminary in 1966, but his formation was interrupted by the communist takeover in 1975, when he and his fellow seminarians were forced into hard labor in the rice fields. In 1979 he fled with 26 members of his extended family in a small motorboat from Cam Ranh Bay, survived a tropical storm and 18 days at sea praying the Rosary morning and evening, and reached the Philippines, then spent ten months in a refugee camp before reaching Texas in 1980.
In the United States he worked at Catholic Charities in Hartford, Connecticut, earned a bachelor's degree cum laude from Merrimack College, and took his first vows with the Missionaries of Our Lady of La Salette in 1987. He graduated from Weston Jesuit School of Theology in 1990 and was ordained on May 11, 1991. After two assignments in Atlanta, he moved to the Diocese of St. Augustine, Florida, in 1996, was incardinated there in 1999, served Christ the King Parish in Jacksonville, helping build a Vietnamese Center, and from 2013 was pastor of St. Joseph Parish in Jacksonville, that diocese's largest parish, with 4,000 families.
Pope Francis appointed him an auxiliary bishop of Orange on October 6, 2017, and Bishop Kevin Vann ordained him bishop on December 19, 2017, at St. Columban Church in Garden Grove. He now serves jointly with Bishop Timothy Freyer as a vicar general, ministering to 1.3 million Catholics. His episcopal motto, from Psalm 23, is 'He leads me,' and parishioners know him for his guitar playing and for tennis.
On the Traditional Latin Mass, Bishop Nguyen has no record of his own on file: no decree in his name, no homily, no public word for or against the old rite has been recovered. He is an auxiliary bishop and a vicar general, and the liturgical decisions of the Diocese of Orange belong to its ordinary, Bishop Kevin Vann, who signed them. To credit or blame Nguyen for them would be to invent a record he does not have.
What Vann did is on the record. On July 28, 2021, Vann authorized any priest already celebrating Mass according to the 1962 Roman Missal, in public or privately, to continue to enjoy that faculty. The diocesan board row records that Vann permitted all four sites in 2021, but that after the 2023 rescript the decades-old parish Mass at St. Mary's by the Sea in Huntington Beach was ended. That later change is board-row material only, not verified here from a diocesan source, and no current site count is asserted.
Nguyen's place in all of this is therefore pastoral, not authorial. As Vann's vicar general he helps run the diocese within which those decisions were taken, but the hand that signed them was Vann's. The honest verdict is the plain one: no record of his own, and no inference drawn from his office or from his ministry to Orange's Vietnamese faithful.