By Derek Spellman

dspellman@joplinglobe.com

CARTHAGE, Mo. — It was late when the boy and his family boarded the boat and struck out across the sea.

They did not know where they would go. They did know they had to leave, and they did know what they were leaving behind.

In the five years since communist North Vietnam had defeated South Vietnam, many Vietnamese Catholics like Simon Le, now 40, had fled the country.

Not everyone succeeded. Those who were caught landed in prison, where they sometimes faced torture.

Le’s family had tried to escape several times before an evening in 1980, when Le and about 40 others crowded into a fishing boat and left their village near Saigon.

He was only a boy, and he wondered whether the family would run out of food before it reached wherever it was going.

“We wanted our freedom to worship God,” he said of why the family left.

Years later, Le’s journey across the sea ultimately brought him to Carthage, where he has served as a priest with the Congregation of the Mother Co-Redemptrix, a seminary.

Thursday — the official beginning of Marian Days — was the start of something of a family reunion for him and the thousands of other Vietnamese Catholics who will be at the CMC campus over the next few days for the annual celebration.

It is a time, Le said, for families to meet, to share “the good times and the bad times,” to renew their faith, and to remember.

As Le recounted his family’s escape, more pilgrims arrived by car and by bus for the Mass that officially opened the festival. Families and friends reconnected among food booths and dense mazes of tents pitched on the CMC grounds and in the yards of residents who live near the campus. Inside the seminary buildings, visitors knelt on the bare concrete floor and prayed before a statue of St. Joseph, or stopped to touch a statue of the Virgin Mary.

It was a series of vignettes that would have been scarcely imaginable to Le when he and his extended family left their village almost 30 years ago.

After their flight from Vietnam, their fishing boat landed in the Philippines. After a brief stay there, the family members went to Japan. It was in Japan that they received word that an American family based in Louisiana would sponsor their trip to the United States.