Helping Hand

Father Jacques Cua, shepherd of the third largest Roman Catholic flock in South Viet Nam, was a man who worked wonders. In his crowded parish in Giadinh, just outside Saigon, the happily smiling, moonfaced little priest was always helping someone. If a Christian family wanted to find a good husband for a daughter, Father Jacques took care of it. If a parishioner needed a job, Father Jacques found him one. When the parish needed a new church, Father Jacques himself scrounged the bricks, helped to build it. He provided his people with free movies, medicine, scholarships, as well as advice and comfort. When French guns were aimed at Giadinh during the bloody battle for Saigon in 1946, it was Jacques Cua who crept through the rebel lines to persuade the commanding French general to send food and money to the parish instead of bombs and bullets.

After the Geneva truce, when hordes of refugees from the Communist North flooded into his parish, Father Jacques's life became busier than ever. "Priests," said the local Communist leader, "are always on the side of rich men." But the parishioners of Giadinh knew better, seeing their priest trudging wearily on his daily errands and returning to his tumbledown vicarage riddled with termites. Their juiciest fruits and biggest duck eggs were reserved for the father's table.

Not long ago, Father Jacques decided that what his parish needed most was a good school, and he promptly set about building it. Where did he get the money? "Oh," said the little priest airily, "our good Lord helps me." This was not quite the whole truth, the crestfallen parishioners of Giadinh learned last week. Rounded up in a Saigon police court along with four other members of an auto-stealing gang, one Roberto Borsetti explained that Father Jacques had financed the new parish school by selling stolen cars. The cars, 17 in all, were snatched by Borsetti's crooks at night, driven into a palm-thatched workshop in the churchyard, repainted and turned over, complete with forged license plates and bills of sale, to Father Jacques, who admitted accepting some of them "as gifts for the church charities."

Father Jacques modestly dismissed the four crack lawyers paid for by his flock. "The Lord will clear me," he announced confidently, as the court sentenced him to 18 months' imprisonment for receiving stolen property.

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