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ROCKPORT - Father John Tran Nguyen, the Franciscan priest who serves St. Peter Catholic Church in this storm-battered coastal town, is a small, slight man whose buzz cut and sunny demeanor resemble a world-renowned man of another faith.

And while Tran, unlike the Dalai Lama, is not a Nobel laureate, he exerts great influence inside Rockport's sizeable Vietnamese community.

"They depend on me, so I have to stand up stronger," Tran said Friday morning after conducting an early-morning outdoor Mass near the congregation's ravaged building on the outskirts of town.

In the wake of Hurricane Harvey's devastation, they're depending on him even more.

Tran, 51, is no stranger to disaster, natural and otherwise. Growing up in a beautiful beach town called Nha Trang at the height of the Vietnam War, his father was thrown in jail. He recalls seeing dead bodies everywhere, as a 9-year-old. He was one of 12 children in a family of devout Roman Catholics; three are priests, two are nuns.

He arrived in America in October 1989, on the day of the San Francisco-Oakland earthquake. He arrived at St. Peter in July of last year.

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Most of Tran's parishioners, about 200 in all, are Vietnamese, with a sprinkling of Anglo and Polish worshippers who come for a Sunday afternoon Mass in English. The Vietnamese arrived on the Gulf Coast in 1975, after the fall of South Vietnam. Many of the church members, part of an older generation, still speak only Vietnamese.

"They were fishermen," said Leah Oliva, a catechist and church secretary who came from Vietnam via Thailand as a 6-year-old in 1975. "The work they did in Vietnam was the work they did here. They brought with them their strong work ethic, their deep family ties and their willingness to help each other."

Those qualities weren't always appreciated in their adopted homeland. They tangled with local shrimpers, who accused them of ignoring rules designed to prevent overfishing. The Ku Klux Klan labeled them communists and threatened to run them out of the country. Violence erupted in the early years.

Oliva scoffs at the communist label. The Vietnamese who made it to America, her family included, were vehemently anti-communist. They had suffered greatly for their political and religious beliefs.

Oliva grew up on a small island called Phu Ouoc. They fled Vietnam on a small boat carrying 45 people and drifted into the Gulf of Thailand without knowing where they were going. They were accosted by pirates, but an American documentary-film crew drove them away and led the refugees into Thailand.

Her family ended up at a Fort Chaffee, Ark., relocation camp and then Rockport, because a photo of a beach they saw was more appealing than a scene of snow-covered Washington State.

As the fishing industry dwindled and as the Vietnamese got better established in the community, many sold their boats and became entrepreneurs. They opened restaurants and nail salons, moved into the construction trades, among a variety of other businesses.

One even became the first Vietnamese-American player in the NFL. Dat Nguyen, an All-American linebacker at Texas A&M and later an All-Pro with the Dallas Cowboys, grew up in Rockport and was a St. Peter member as part of the large, extended Nguyen family.

"I wasn't born in Texas, but I was raised Texan," Nguyen told Esquire magazine years ago.

The Vietnamese are the second-largest minority group in Aransas County. "They are an integral part of this community," Rockport Mayor C.J. Wax said.

Oliva, 47, grew up in the old part of Rockport, but like Nguyen and many other second- and third-generation immigrants, she went off to seek her fortune elsewhere. She and her husband lived in Spring for 25 years. Working as a human resources specialist for KBR, she managed the international company's 21,000 expatriates. The couple came home to the coast a little over a year ago to help Leah's older sister, who raised her after their mother died in an auto accident when Oliva was 11.

She also came to get involved with the church. Established in the 1980s, St. Peter's is still the heart and soul of the Vietnamese community. Although members are growing older, she hopes that Tran, the parish's first bilingual priest, can attract younger members.

St. Peter's members built their sanctuary themselves; it was dedicated in 1992. From a massive wooden crucifix behind the altar, miraculously undamaged, Jesus looks down today on a sanctuary ripped apart by the hurricane and perhaps a tornado.

Wind and rain poured through a huge whole in the wall, and most of the stained-glass windows shattered. Pieces of glass, clumps of insulation and roofing materials cover the floor and litter wooden pews, where, just a few Sundays ago, men were sitting on the right side and women on the left, just as they did in Vietnam long ago.

Both the sanctuary and Tran's mobile-home rectory and office are a total loss. He's driving back and forth to Corpus Christi, where he's living temporarily in a home for retired priests.

"It's very sad," he said Friday morning. "We lost everything."