Our Lady of Mercy Orphanage and School

Our Lady of Mercy Orphanage and School was a Chicago Archdiocese-funded orphanage and school in Saigon, Vietnam, and one of the Cardinal’s favored projects. Its most consequential role in the narrative is as the setting for Father Stefan Wycazik’s longest and most dangerous assignment: six years of wartime service, ending in the evacuation of 126 children as Saigon fell.

Mission and Leadership

The account introduces the institution through its leadership and the risks surrounding its work. Father Bill Nader ran the orphanage and school, with Father Stefan Wycazik serving as his second-in-command. Nader carried scars from bullet wounds in his left shoulder and right calf; he had also lost two Vietnamese priests and a previous American colleague to Vietcong terrorists. These details establish a mission operating amid sustained violence, without presenting the institution merely as a backdrop to it.

Wycazik’s Six Years in Saigon

The Saigon posting was Wycazik’s most exotic assignment after a series of difficult parish appointments. For the full six years he served in the war zone, he never doubted either that he would survive or that the work was worthwhile. The narrative connects that steadiness to his later approach to crises: hardship does not, for him, make care meaningless. The orphanage’s work is measured in the people it serves, not in whether its efforts can end the larger conflict.

Fall of Saigon and Evacuation

When Saigon fell, Nader and Wycazik escaped the country with thirteen nuns and 126 children. The account places this rescue against the mass slaughter that followed, but emphasizes that Wycazik did not let the scale of the catastrophe erase the significance of the lives brought out. The number 126 remains important precisely because it is limited: amid widespread death, each child saved still counted as a substantial achievement.

Narrative Significance

The institution’s brief but defining appearance supplies the history behind Wycazik’s confidence and willingness to act under pressure. It also gives his later religious convictions a practical foundation: his faith is associated with sustained service and the concrete preservation of lives, rather than with an assurance that suffering will be prevented. Our Lady of Mercy is thus remembered chiefly through the people who served there and the children they carried to safety.