Catholic Church Hoi An: Mass Schedule & Visitor Guide 2026

The Catholic Church Hoi An — Hoi An Parish, Diocese of Da Nang — holds Mass every day, including an English-language Mass every Sunday at 16:00. It sits at 2 Nguyen Truong To, a five-minute walk from the Japanese Covered Bridge, and it is the oldest Catholic parish in Vietnam: founded on 18 January 1616, a decade before Alexandre de Rhodes ever set foot in the country.

This page gives you the full Mass schedule, the exact address, how to get there, what to wear, and a short history of the parish. If you are only here for one thing: Sunday 16:00 is the English Mass.

Catholic Church Hoi An mass schedule 2026

This is the regular Mass schedule at Hoi An Parish. The Sunday 16:00 Mass is celebrated in English — the only regular English Mass in Hoi An.

English Mass in Hoi An: what to expect

The Sunday 16:00 Mass at the Catholic Church Hoi An is the practical reason most foreign visitors find this page. A few honest notes:

Where is the Catholic Church Hoi An? How to get there

The church is at 2 Nguyen Truong To, Hoi An, just north of the Ancient Town. Since 1 July 2025 Hoi An has been part of Da Nang City following Vietnam’s administrative merger — older listings still say “Quang Nam province”, which is no longer correct.

👉 Open the Catholic Church Hoi An on Google Maps

Visiting the church: what to wear and how to behave

The Catholic Church Hoi An is a working parish, not an attraction. It is open and welcoming to visitors, and there is no ticket — but a few things are worth knowing.

A short history: 400 years of the oldest parish in Vietnam

In 1615, three Jesuits — the Italian Francesco Buzomi, the Portuguese Diego Carvalho, and Brother Antonio Dias — landed at Da Nang and made their way to Faifo, the trading port we now call Hoi An. They came to serve a Japanese Christian community already living there.

Preaching in Faifo itself went badly: the port was full of foreign merchants with no interest in a sermon. So the missionaries moved 10 km inland to Thanh Chiem, where they found an audience. Ten people were baptised by April 1615; more than three hundred within a year. Buzomi formally founded Hoi An parish on 18 January and built its first church — making this the oldest Catholic parish in Vietnam. (Note: 18 January 1615 is the date the Jesuit party landed at Cua Han — Da Nang. The parish itself was founded a year later, on 18 January 1616. The two dates are often confused.)

The building you see today is the fourth. Parishioners put up a wooden church in 1914. Father Pierre Auguste Gallioz replaced it with a stone Gothic church in 1935. In 1965, with the parish grown far beyond the old 144 m² building, Father Joseph Le Van Ly demolished it and built the present 720 m² church — deliberately without a bell tower, because the site sat at the end of a wartime airstrip and a tower risked a plane strike. The bell tower was finally added in 1995.

The parish’s fortunes have swung hard. It reached its golden age in the 1950s and 60s with an orphanage, two primary schools and a growing congregation. After 1975 it lost the orphanage, the schools and most of its land, and the number of parishioners fell from 2,216 to under a thousand. By 2006 it counted 1,225 people in 384 households. It remains a small parish carrying an outsized history.

The tombs of the Western clergy

In a corner of the churchyard are five graves — one of the very few physical traces left in Hoi An of the Jesuit and Paris Foreign Missions priests who worked here from the 17th century onwards.

The inner row holds three: Guillaume Mahot, Francisco Perez and Valere Rist. Nearer the gate lie two more — the Vietnamese priest Paul Nguyen Tuong, and Pierre Auguste Gallioz, the Frenchman who built the 1935 church, ran the parish for eighteen years and died overworked in 1953.

The church and the tombs were together listed as a Provincial Historical and Cultural Monument in 2008. It is a quiet corner and takes five minutes to walk. Most visitors to Hoi An never know it is there.

Photos of the church

Also useful nearby: our guides to Hoi An cycling routes and Tra Que Vegetable Village. Vietnamese speakers: xem giờ thánh lễ bằng tiếng Việt.

Catholic Church Hoi An FAQ

In short

The Catholic Church Hoi An is a five-minute walk from the busiest street in the Ancient Town, and almost nobody goes. It has been a parish since 1615 — longer than any other in Vietnam — and it still runs as one: Mass every day, a congregation of about a thousand, five missionary graves under the trees in the yard.

If you want the English Mass, that is Sunday at 16:00. If you just want twenty quiet minutes and some history that predates almost everything else standing in Hoi An, come on a weekday morning and walk the yard. Either way, call ahead if the timing matters. 🕊️