‘The Doors Of This Rectory Are Never Locked’: A Pastor’s Katrina Story

Father Vien Nguyen is the former pastor of Mary Queen of Vietnam, a Catholic church that serves a Vietnamese-American enclave in New Orleans East. He was only two years in his tenure when Hurricane Katrina and its levee failures drowned the area in 2005. In this edition of the Historic New Orleans Collection's oral history series, NOLA Life Stories, Nguyen describes his experience riding out the storm and its aftermath with his parishioners.