A country that the world has forgotten

Laos is one of the most invisible countries in the world for the Western eye. A territory between mountains in the heart of South-East Asia, with seven million inhabitants living in the majority of agriculture. A single party communist regime - the Lao Pathet - has ruled since 1975 with a hand that alternates periods of controlled tolerance with others of open repression. Tourism has grown in recent decades - Luang Prabang, Mekong temples, Kuang Si waterfalls - but Laos remains, for most of the world, a blank map.

For the Catholic Church, however, Laos is a sacred place. Not in spite of its invisibility, but in part by it: it is one of those territories where faith is kept in conditions of extreme difficulty, without resources, without protection, without recognition, with the pure force of conviction and testimony. And it has a treasure that very few 20th century national churches can show: 17 beatified martyrs.

The Holy Martyrs of Laos

On December 11, 2016, Pope Francis proclaimed 17 martyrs of Laos to be blessed at a ceremony presided over by Cardinal Angelo Amato in Vientiane, the Laosian capital. It was a historic event: the first beatification held on Laosian soil. The seventeen had died between 1954 and 1970, in different circumstances but with a common denominator: their faith in Christ and their ministry as priests, religious or catechists.

Among the seventeen are French and Spanish priests of the Foreign Missions of Paris and of the Society of Missionaries of the Sacred Heart. But there are also - and this is what makes the list truly significant - Laosian priests and laity: men and women of the country who chose faith above life at a time when that choice was completely real and completely irreversible.

Father Khamphanh Yousombath: the priest of the Rosary

Among all the martyrs of Laos, the figure of Father Khamphanh Yousombath has a particularly Marian dimension. He was a Laosian priest, born in the province of Savannakhet, ordained in the 1950s when the French missionary presence was still possible but already precarious. Khamphanh - a name that in Laosian means something similar to "blessing of fortune" - became one of the first native priests of Laos, at a time when most of the clergy were European.

He had an intense devotion to the Rosary. In the communities that he visited - on foot, on a bicycle, on boats by the tributaries of the Mekong - he always taught the same prayer. Not because I was the only one who knew: I understood that the Rosary was the prayer that a community without a resident priest could support alone. Once learned, he did not need books or infrastructure. I needed only memory and will.

When the Lao Pathet took control of the provinces in the 1960s, Father Khamphanh continued his ministry in increasingly dangerous areas. He was arrested, released, re-arrested. The exact details of his death are not fully documented - as in the case of many martyrs from closed countries - but the testimonies of the survivors of his community agree that he died praying. The Rosary was in his hands.

«El padre Khamphanh nos decía siempre: «Si algún día no puedo estar con vosotros, rezad el Rosario juntos. La Virgen sabe dónde estáis.» Nosotros lo recordamos cada vez que rezamos.»

Father Mario Borzaga and the Rosary in the rain

Mario Borzaga was born in Trento, Italy, in 1932. He became an Oblate priest of Mary Immaculate - an order with an explicit Marian devotion inscribed in her name - and was sent to Laos in 1957, at the age of 25. He had the vitality and enthusiasm of the young priests who come to a mission with the world ahead. He learned the Laosian quickly. It entered the northern provinces, the Hmong territories of the mountains, where the mission was as difficult as it was exciting.

In their diaries - which are preserved and which were key in the process of beatification - Borzaga writes about the Rosary with a frequency that is not ritual but felt. He writes about storm nights in which the tens pray with their hands soaked with rain. He writes about Hmong communities that have learned the Hail Mary in his language and pray it with a concentration that moves him. He writes about the certainty that the Virgin is present in these mountains although no sanctuary the name.

On 25 April 1960, Mario Borzaga and his guide and catechist Paolo Thoj Xyooj were captured by the Pathet Lao guerrillas in the province of Xieng Khouang. They were twenty-eight and eighteen years old, respectively. Their bodies were never found. What is known from the last days of Borzaga comes from his notes found in the mission: the last entry of his diary, written days before his capture, speaks of the Virgin Mary with a nature that has nothing to do with her, the nature of someone who has been talking to her for years.

The Hmong and the Rosary in the mountains

The Hmong are a town in the northern Laos mountains, of Chinese-Tibetan origin, with a history of migration and persecution that fills several centuries. During the Vietnam War, a part of the Hmong was recruited by the CIA to fight the Lao Pathet and the Vietcong in what was called the Laos "secret war" - secret to the Western public, not to those who suffered it. When the Communists took power in 1975, the Hmong who had collaborated with the United States were mercilessly persecuted: reeducation camps, executions, mass exile to Thailand.

Among the Hmong are Catholic communities that have been carrying their faith since the time of the first French missionaries of the 19th century. For these communities, the Rosary is not a book practice but a prayer of survival. In the 1970s and 1980s, with priests missing or imprisoned, with closed churches, with any prohibited public religious practice, the Hmong communities prayed the Rosary in the corn fields, in the jungle nights, in the refugee camps across the Thai border.

There is something in Hmong spirituality - with its sense of circular time, its veneration for the ancestors, its intimate relationship with the cycles of nature - that found in Marian devotion a natural point of contact. Mary as a mother, Mary as an intercessor, Mary as the one who remembers those who the world forgets: that resonated with something deep in the cosmovence of a people used to being forgotten.

The Laosian Church today: forty-five thousand out of seven million

Laos today has about seven million inhabitants, of whom about 45,000 are Catholics: a percentage less than 1%. It is one of the smallest Catholic communities in relative terms in Asia. The communist regime of the Lao Pathet allows religious practice within strict limits: foreign priests cannot exercise ministry; new priests and religious need government approval; catechesis activities outside church buildings are restricted.

And yet the Church in Laos grows. Slowly, silently, without great campaigns or visible structures, but it grows. Estimates of the number of Catholics are difficult to verify precisely because many communities prefer to keep a low profile, far from the official records the government could use to control their activity. What the missionaries working in Laos describe - with great care, avoiding endangering their communities - is a faith that is transmitted in the family context, in small meetings, in the village-to-village trips that lay catechists make on foot or on a motorcycle through the northern provinces.

The Rosary remains the center of that transmission. Nothing has changed in substance: the same prayer that Father Borzaga taught the Hmong in the 1950s, the same as Father Khamphanh carried from community to community praying in the rivers and in the fields, the same as the survivors secretly recited while the Lao Pathet consolidated his power. The fingers that count the oatmeal in Laos in 2026 are the grandchildren of those who prayed in silence fifty years ago.

"In Laos, faith is neither great nor visible. But it's real. And he's the least you can expect."

The Virgin as the nexus of a scattered Church

In a country where churches are few, where priests are few, where communities are separated by forests and mountains and rivers, devotion to Our Lady of the Rosary performs a function that goes beyond the strictly devotional: it is the link that unites a Church that cannot meet in the same place.

The Laosian Catholics of the northern provinces know that at this very moment, in Vientiane to the south, in Paksé to the east, in the Hmong villages of the north-west mountains, others are praying the same prayer. The same Ave Mary, the same tens, the same mysteries. There is no direct communication between them, no visible structure that the one, no media that connect them. They are joined by the prayer they learned from their parents, which their parents learned from the missionaries, which the missionaries brought from France and Italy a hundred and fifty years ago.

This uninterrupted chain of prayer, which passes through the martyrs of the 1950s and 1960s, through the survivors of the repression of the seventy-five, by the catechists of today who walk through the villages: that chain is the Church of Laos. And at its center, as always, as everywhere where faith has had to survive adversity, is the Virgin Mary, who does not abandon her children even if the world has forgotten them.

• 19th centuryThe Paris Foreign Missions (MEP) establish the first Catholic missions in Laos. Slow and difficult evangelization in a largely Buddhist territory.
• 1954First wave of martyrdom. Father Jean Wauthier is killed in Phong Saly. The period of persecution of the Lao Pathet begins.
• 1960Father Mario Borzaga and catechist Paolo Thoj Xyooj disappear in the province of Xieng Khouang. They never find their bodies.
• 1970Last wave of documented martyrdom of the Blessed group. Father Khamphanh Yousombath is the last to disappear.
• 1975The Lao Pathet takes power. Close most churches. Exile or imprisonment of foreign missionaries.
• 201611 December: Beatification of the 17 Martyrs of Laos in Vientiane, presided over by Cardinal Amato. First beatification on Laosian soil.

In the visible world, Laos is one of the last communist countries on the planet, a regime that appears in the last positions of all religious freedom indices. In the world of faith, Laos is something different: it is one of the places where the Church has shown more clearly that she does not need buildings or power or resources to exist. He needs people who remember a prayer and teach it to his children. He needs the Hail Mary said in a low voice in the dark, with his fingers moving on an untold Rosary. He needs the certainty that there is a Mother who is looking, even if no sanctuary points it out.

That's Laos. That's enough.