Ho Ca Dau is taking catechism classes to be baptized into the Catholic Church after having helped persecute Christians for nearly a decade, treating them as enemies of communism.
The 27-year-old from the Bru-Van Kieu ethnic group believes his conversion is akin to that of St. Paul, who “persecuted Christians but fell to the ground on the way to Damascus and chose to follow Jesus.”
Dau was born into an atheist family in a village in the central province of Quang Tri. In the village, he treated Christians as a “reactionary force,” fighting against the communist government, he said.
His father, a soldier and Communist Party member, told him that religious forces such as Christianity abuse ethnic villagers and damage the government’s revolutionary causes.
“There is no God in the world and humans can do all things,” Dau recalls his father telling him.
Dau studied at a state-run boarding school where he joined the Ho Chi Minh Communist Youth Union, a socio-political organization that educates young people to be loyal communists.
After completing high school in 2015, he volunteered to serve as a militiaman to maintain social order and se-curity in the village.
He tried his best to get rewarded by his superiors by “following, snooping, and eavesdropping on people” who came to the village from other places. People came to trade in dried fish, sugar, milk, cooking oil, and clothes, besides supplying notebooks to the local people.
“I suspected them of illegally spreading Catholicism and Protestantism. I accused them of endangering social security,” he recalled.
In 2016, Dau got five of them arrested for “keeping crosses and copies of the Bibles in their bags.”
Dau believed the cross was an “evil” force and actively prevented local Catholics from gathering for prayers.
“One day I fainted because of hunger and was lying on the side of the road. A Catholic passer-by took me to the hospital and covered all my medical treatment costs,” he said.
“As he began mixing with the other Catholics, he became deeply interested in Catholi-cism,” Vinh said.