Norcross Fall Festival Marks a Three-Parish Catholic Map

Holy Vietnamese Martyrs Church closed its 2026 fall festival on Sept. 4 to 6 after three Labor Day nights of Mass, food stalls, and a billed concert on its Norcross campus. The theme was Radiant Roots, Rang Ro Coi Nguon in Vietnamese, and the parish put singer Chau Khai Phong on the poster months ahead of opening night.

The same week, a third Vietnamese Catholic church in Cobb County was already packing a former elementary school. The fair in Gwinnett is the public face of a community that no longer fits one garage, or even one county.

Three Nights of Radiant Roots in Norcross

The campus at 4545-A Timmers Way sits just off Interstate 85, the same hill where the parish dedicated its new church on Thanksgiving Day in 2019. Festival posts put Friday’s public hours from 6 p.m. to midnight, Saturday from 1 p.m. to midnight, and Sunday from 1 p.m., with a morning Mass before the tents opened.

Friday, Sept. 4, was the ceremonial start. A commencement Mass was set for 7:30 a.m. The opening ceremony was listed for 6 p.m., the food court for 6:30 p.m., opening entertainment for 7:15 p.m., and the evening concert for 8:45 p.m., with the night ending at 12:30 a.m.

FRIDAY NIGHT ON THE CAMPUS

• 7:30 a.m.: Commencement Mass on the parish grounds.
• 6 p.m.: Opening ceremony for Lễ Hội Mùa Thu 2026.
• 6:30 p.m.: Food court opens for the first night of stalls.
• 7:15 p.m.: Opening entertainment, including cultural performance sets.
• 8:45 p.m.: Evening concert on the main stage.

Chau Khai Phong, billed in late July as the first named act, is a Vietnamese pop singer whose catalog includes Ngam Hoa Le Da. The parish YouTube channel posted a short festival clip while the weekend was underway, and a Facebook page for the fair carried a multi-hour Sunday live stream of the stage program.

Two weeks later the work of taking it down was still parish business. Organizers thanked merchants on Sept. 19 and called volunteers to the pavilion on Sunday, Sept. 20, at 6:30 p.m. for photos and gifts. The fair runs on unpaid labor and vendor fees, then it ends with a roll call in the hall, not with a press release.

A year earlier, on Aug. 29 to 31, 2025, Archbishop Gregory J. Hartmayer, OFM Conv., stood with pastor Father Francis X. Tuan Tran at the opening ceremony while a traditional drum group played. That weekend had the same bones: Masses, a food court, entertainment, and raffles, drawing people from across metro Atlanta.

A Chevrolet Lot Became a $14 Million Church

The festival is younger than the community and older than the building that now towers over the interstate. Vietnamese Catholics first gathered as a mission around 1996 at Holy Cross Church in northeast Atlanta. In 2006 they moved into a former Chevrolet dealership in Norcross, turning a repair garage into a sanctuary that seated about 675 people.

That first Norcross campus cost about $1.4 million and already held some 800 families and 500 children in religious education. Father Tran, who fled Vietnam in 1987 at age 29, going overland to Cambodia and then by boat to Thailand, told the dedication crowd years later that minders had watched him after his seminary was shut. “It forced me to flee their capture otherwise I would have been put in prison,” he said.

The Archdiocese of Atlanta parish listing dates the community as a parish from 2013. Archbishop Wilton D. Gregory’s decree took effect at midnight on Oct. 16, 2013, and set the parish feast on Nov. 24. At the thanksgiving Mass that December, Father Tran said the community had 1,270 families and 970 teens and children in catechism.

THE ROAD TO TIMMERS WAY

1. Around 1996: Vietnamese Catholics form an official mission at Holy Cross Church in Atlanta.
2. 2006: The mission moves into a former Chevrolet dealership at 4545-A Timmers Way and turns a garage into a church.
3. January 24 to 25, 2009: Organizers date the first fundraising fair to a spring event called Hoi Cho Mua Xuan.
4. Late 2010: After a fight over a proposed waste transfer station, the church agrees to buy the neighboring nine acres for $2.7 million.
5. October 16, 2013: The mission is raised to parish status.
6. November 28, 2019: Bishop Joel M. Konzen, SM, dedicates a new $14 million church that seats about 1,500.

An estimated 4,000 people came for that Thanksgiving dedication, filling the new nave and the old social hall, with some 30 priests on the altar. The parish then counted some 1,400 families. More than 1,000 young people were in religious education. Sizemore Group’s church design notes describe a nine-acre hilltop meant to read as an American church with Vietnamese marks, the job Van Winkle Construction built.

C.C. Nguyen, a parish leader on the building committee, put the brief in one line at the dedication. “We are a Vietnamese American community. We are going to build an American church with Vietnamese flair,” he said, standing under a roof about 55 feet high.

Labor Day Weekend as the Parish Engine

The fall festival was never a side picnic. Organizers launched it in 2009 to help pay for a larger church, and the 2019 building still carries that history in every raffle book. Food sales, donations, and the Labor Day crowd were how the community “worked to raise millions for this project,” as the dedication account put it, alongside the weekly envelope.

Father Tran has used the same invitation for years. Ahead of the 2025 weekend he said the point was faith, fellowship, and culture in the same tents.

Each returning autumn offers us a precious opportunity to come together as a community to celebrate the fall festival, not only to preserve our faith and nurture fellowship but also to honor and promote our Vietnamese cultural heritage here in the heart of American Society.

Father Francis X. Tuan Tran, pastor, Holy Vietnamese Martyrs Church

Mid-autumn games for children sit next to three-region cooking, a concert, and a Eucharistic tent. Pastor letters on the parish site have described the weekend as a family reunion and as the way the church introduces itself to Vietnamese neighbors who are not Catholic, and to anyone else who can find the exits off I-85.

That mix is why the dates stay locked to Labor Day. Families already have the Monday off. Relatives drive in from other Southeastern cities. The parish gets three nights of stall rent, raffle sales, and a stage that can carry a visiting singer without pretending the weekend is only a concert.

Why Organizers Still Cite 40,000 Guests

No turnstile count for 2026 has been published. The festival’s own page still says the event draws up to 40,000 people and that the money supports faith, culture, and church growth. That ceiling is not new.

THE CROWD THE PARISH CITES

• Opening night, 2014: About 10,000 people came on Friday, Aug. 29, for the first night of that year’s three-day fair.
• Weekend, 2014: The crowd for the full event was estimated at 40,000, a figure organizers still use as the top of the range.
• 2019 dedication: The new church seats about 1,500; an estimated 4,000 people packed the campus on Thanksgiving Day.

Those numbers are estimates, not audited tickets, and they should be read that way. Even at the low end, a Friday night of 10,000 people on a parish parking lot is a city event wearing a church name. The aroma in 2014 was already fish sauce, grilled beef, and pork, under tents visible from the interstate, with Vietnamese Catholics coming in from around the Southeast.

The volunteer thank-you on Sept. 20 is the other scale marker. A fair that large does not run on staff. It runs on parishioners who hang lights, haul gas tanks, cook, and then come back two Sundays later for a group photo in the pavilion.

Cobb County Opened the Third Vietnamese Church

The sleeper in the 2026 weekend was not a new menu item. It was geography. Our Lady of La Vang Church in Marietta celebrated its first Mass in August 2026 in a vacant Cobb County grade school the community and the archdiocese had bought the previous fall for nearly $4.3 million. City permits came through in late July.

About 700 people came to that first Mass, nearly doubling the chapel. Father Dominic Tran, 54, ordained in 2009 and no relation cited to the Norcross pastor, said he had been asked to start from nothing. “We didn’t have anything yet. I put my trust in God,” he said. He walked nearly two dozen neighboring houses with chocolate and wine before the work crews arrived.

The building is about 60,000 square feet. Religious education had grown to 100 students from 20 in 2024. Pews that seat more than 300 were donated by a Protestant church. The altar and other sacred objects came from Our Lady of Vietnam in Riverdale and St. Thomas More in Decatur. For months before the move, the community had been in the gym at Blessed Trinity High School in Roswell, because the drive from Cobb to Norcross was too far for many families, and because Holy Vietnamese Martyrs was already drawing thousands to Mass.

THE THREE VIETNAMESE CHURCHES

The Norcross festival did not buy the Cobb school. It showed, every Labor Day, why a west-side parish had to exist. U.S. Census Bureau figures from the 2019 to 2023 American Community Survey count 24,493 Vietnamese residents in Gwinnett, with a margin of ±2,606. The Atlanta Regional Commission, using 2023 ACS tables, counts 51,868 Vietnamese residents in the 11-county region, about 13.6 percent of the area’s Asian American and Pacific Islander population, with the densest cluster in southern Gwinnett between Lilburn and Lawrenceville and a second cluster in Clayton County.

Less than 10 percent of Vietnam’s population is Catholic, so a Vietnamese neighborhood is not automatically a Mass crowd. The three churches are how the Catholic share of that map gathers in its own language. Dianne Vu, baking mooncakes after Mass to raise money in Marietta, said the work is not about skill. “We try to work hard to make this happen,” she said. “It’s just not because of our ability, but we’re working with love.”

The Altar Measures 117 Inches on Purpose

The name on the Norcross marquee is not a slogan. It points to 117 Catholics and missionaries killed in Vietnam between 1745 and 1862 and canonized by Pope John Paul II on June 19, 1988. John Paul II’s canonization homily grouped them as eight bishops, 50 priests, and 59 lay people, among them Agnes Le Thi Thanh, a mother of six.

Bishop Konzen used that history at the 2019 dedication. “Christ has promised us that if we stand with him, if we die with him, then we too will live with him in a glorious life that will not end. The Holy Martyrs did this,” he said. The parish feast stays on Nov. 24, the memorial of St. Andrew Dung-Lac and Companions, months after the Labor Day tents come down.

MARKS BUILT INTO THE NAVE

• The altar: 117 inches long and 117 centimeters wide, about 46 inches, matching the number of canonized martyrs.
• The crucifix: 15.5 feet high, with an eight-foot corpus by artist Vu Dinh Lam.
• The floor: Dark red rectangular borders recall the bamboo mats used to wrap the dead, with marble circles for the seven sacraments in imported Vietnamese stone.

Nguyen also pushed for the two large crosses on the roof, a memory of driving with his father from North Carolina to Virginia to collect a Vietnamese priest for Mass. Father Tran asked the builders for “simplicity, but elegant,” a place “for God and man to pray” and “for the family to gather together.” Gothic arches nod to French missionaries. Three doors, three tiers, and three exterior colors stand for earth, humankind, and the divine.

God, Nguyen said at the dedication, “led us all the way to this.”

Frequently Asked Questions

When Is the Holy Vietnamese Martyrs Fall Festival?

It is held every year on Labor Day weekend on the parish campus in Norcross. The 2026 dates were Friday, Sept. 4 through Sunday, Sept. 6. The parish feast day is separate: Nov. 24, the memorial of St. Andrew Dung-Lac and Companions, set in the 2013 decree that raised the mission to a parish.

Where Is Holy Vietnamese Martyrs Church in Norcross?

The address is 4545-A Timmers Way, Norcross, GA 30093, just off Beaver Ruin Road near Interstate 85. The parish office number is (770) 921-0077. The hilltop campus is the old dealership lot plus the nine acres bought after the waste-transfer fight.

Who Are the Vietnamese Martyrs the Parish Is Named For?

They are 117 Catholics and missionaries canonized on June 19, 1988: 96 Vietnamese, 11 Spanish Dominicans, and 10 French priests of the Paris Foreign Missions Society. The group includes eight bishops, 50 priests, and 59 lay people. One of the lay saints is Agnes Le Thi Thanh, a mother of six.

How Many Vietnamese Catholic Churches Are in Metro Atlanta?

Three. Our Lady of Vietnam in Riverdale opened in 1998. Holy Vietnamese Martyrs in Norcross is the Gwinnett parish. Our Lady of La Vang in Marietta celebrated its first Mass in August 2026 inside a former Cobb County elementary school of about 60,000 square feet, after months in the gym at Blessed Trinity High School in Roswell.

On the Norcross hill the lanterns are down and the drumheads are stored. The third parish in Cobb is still knocking out gym walls to make a bigger sanctuary. Labor Day will come around again, and the stalls will go back up on Timmers Way.