Cardinal Pham Minh Mân, who formed Vietnamese priests in postwar period, dies at 92
March 24, 2026
Cardinal Jean-Baptiste Pham Minh Mân, who formed priests in Communist Vietnam after the Vietnam War, died on March 22 at the age of 92.
Born in 1934 and ordained the priesthood in 1965, Pham Minh Mân was appointed a bishop by Pope St. John Paul II in 1993. The prelate became archbishop of Ho Chi Minh City (the former Saigon) in 1998, a decade after the city’s coadjutor archbishop, Venerable François-Xavier Nguyễn Văn Thuận, was released from thirteen years of internment.
St. John Paul II named Archbishop Pham Minh Mân a cardinal in 2003. He retired in 2014.
“From the very first years of his priestly formation, he strove to promote evangelization in a country that—having embraced communist ideology—made its hostility toward the Christian faith keenly felt, inflicting severe losses upon the Church: venues and centers for pastoral, charitable, and educational activities—such as seminaries, Catholic schools, and private hospitals—were forced to curtail their operations before ultimately being confiscated by the State,” the Vatican newspaper reported. “Against this backdrop, Jean-Baptiste Pham Minh Mân never wavered in what he regarded as a true mission, working tirelessly to secure their reopening.”
L’Osservatore Romano added:
In the mid-1970s, following the reunification of Vietnam under the communist regime, he was entrusted with the task of priestly formation—a duty he fulfilled amidst immense material and psychological hardships. Even in 1988—when the government authorized six seminaries across the country to resume their regular operations, including the Saint Quy Seminary, where Pham Minh Man had been appointed Rector—problems continued to persist, such as shortages of facilities and faculty members, compounded by the fact that, since 1975, no priest had been permitted to travel abroad to pursue advanced studies in ecclesiastical disciplines.
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