No Christianist Here

by Chris Bodenner
Adam Nagourney reports:

Mr. Cao was a refugee from Vietnam at age 8, a former Jesuit seminarian, a philosophy student with a penchant for Camus and Dostoyevsky.... Mr. Cao said that while he was studying to be a priest in the 1990s, he had “the great opportunity to work with the poor in conditions of extreme poverty” in Mexico and in Vietnamese refugee camps in Hong Kong children playing in the slums, children behind bars. He wanted to be a missionary.

“From there, the desire to bring social reforms, or to promote certain social change,” Mr. Cao said in an interview Sunday at an outdoor cafe in the Uptown neighborhood here. But, he added, “Politics and religious life don’t mix.” ... “I don’t want to conform to any ideology, to be put into a little corner,” Mr. Cao said.