Rev. Father Fantasy

Several years ago a fellow Vietnamese adoptee had given me copies of articles written before and during Operation Babylift for a project I was doing back then. While flipping through them recently, I came across a rather disturbing, yet intriguing, letter written by a Rev. Robert Griffin back in 1974 that probably expressed a common sentiment at that time. The bulk of the letter’s content is simply Griffin heaping praise upon Betty Tisdale’s work at An Lac Orphanage.

But, what really caught my eye are the excerpts below. Considering that our language has become a little more sophisticated when talking about adopting children internationally, let me know if Rev. Griffin’s words make you raise your eyebrows just a little:

Letters To A Lonely God: the children’s hour by Reverend Robert Griffin
The Observer, Friday, 03/22/74

…I dreamed of life as an adventure of imperishable beauty, the most flawless situation I could imagine for myself was to be a missionary priest, standing in a rice paddy, surrounded by Chinese children.

Now, twenty years after my ordination in 1954, I am again dreaming a young man’s fantasy of going to Asia, perhaps for the summer, looking for the rice paddy of my vision, where the little children have been waiting all the years of my life.

On Sunday mornings, when the children at their Mass bring me nickels and dimes and quarters as offerings, that money will become the gift of the urchins of Notre Dame to the urchins of An Lac Orphanage in Vietnam.

After the tragedy of the Vietnam war, I am not sure what shape the rice paddies might be in, or whether children can go there to play with stout missionaries.