Catholic Vietnam: A Church from Empire to Nation

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Catholic Vietnam

FROM INDOCHINA TO VIETNAM:

REVOLUTION AND WAR IN A GLOBAL PERSPECTIVE

Edited by Fredrik Logevall and Christopher E. Goscha

Assuming the Burden: Europe and the American Commitment to War in Vietnam, by Mark Atwood Lawrence

Indochina: An Ambiguous Colonization, 1858–1954, by Pierre Brocheux and Daniel Hémery

Vietnam 1946: How the War Began, by Stein Tønnesson

Imperial Heights: Dalat and the Making and Undoing of French Indochina, by Eric T. Jennings

Catholic Vietnam: A Church from Empire to Nation, by Charles Keith

Catholic Vietnam

A Church from Empire to Nation

____

Charles Keith

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Berkeley Los Angeles London

University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu.

University of California Press

Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

University of California Press, Ltd.

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© 2012 by The Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Keith, Charles, 1977–.

Catholic Vietnam : a church from empire to nation / Charles Keith.

p. cm.

Originally presented as the author’s thesis (Ph. D.)—Yale University, 2008.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-520-27247-7 (cloth : alk. paper) — isbn 978-0-520-95382-6 (ebook)

1. Catholic Church—Vietnam—History. 2. Vietnam—Church history. I. Title.

BX1650.A7K45 2012

282'.597—dc23

2012021916

Manufactured in the United States of America

Portions of chapters 3 and 5 appeared in Charles Keith, Annam Uplifted: The First Vietnamese Bishops and the Birth of a National Church, 1919– 1945, Journal of Vietnamese Studies 3, no. 2 (Summer 2008): 128–71, and are used here by permission of the University of California Press.

In keeping with a commitment to support environmentally responsible and sustainable printing practices, UC Press has printed this book on Rolland Enviro100, a 100% post-consumer fiber paper that is FSC certified, deinked, processed chlorine-free, and manufactured with renewable biogas energy. It is acid-free and EcoLogo certified.

For my family, here and gone

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Foreword

Introduction

1. A Church between the Nguyễn and the French

2. A Colonial Church Divided

3. The Birth of a National Church

4. Vietnamese Catholic Tradition on Trial

5. A National Church Experienced

6. The Culture and Politics of Vietnamese Catholic Nationalism

7. A National Church in Revolution and War

Epilogue. A National Church Divided

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ILLUSTRATIONS

1. Three priests arrested for anti-French activities, 1909

2. Church in rural Tonkin, ca. 1890

3. The execution of Pierre Borie, November 24, 1838

4. Tomb to Vietnamese martyrs, Tonkin, ca. 1900

5. Statue of Pigneau de Béhaine and Prince Nguyễn Phúc Cảnh, ca. 1905

6. Nguyễn Hữu Bài

7. Broadside of Pope Pius XI and the first two Vietnamese bishops, ca. 1935

8. Scene from the first Vietnamese adaptation of the Passion of Christ, 1913

9. Drawing from Vietnamese Catholic Youth bulletin, 1935

10. Postcard of the cathedral at Phát Diệm and the tomb of Trần Lục (Père Six), ca. 1933

11. Young Catholic Workers brochure, 1939

12. Bishop Lê Hữu Từ inspecting his troops, 1952

13. Catholic refugees from Bùi Chu awaiting transport to the south, 1954

14. Ngô Đình Diệm and Ngô Đình Thục, 1961

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book has taken me a long time to write, and I owe many people and institutions a great deal of thanks for their help along the way. I began this project during my time at Yale University, where John Merriman and Ben Kiernan helped me learn how to think about the intersections between European history and Southeast Asian history that this book explores. I would not be where I am today without their ongoing guidance and friendship. Jay Winter was not only a formative intellectual influence during this time; I also have him to thank for this book’s title. Quang Phu Van has done more than anyone to teach me Vietnamese, and I, like many others, benefited greatly from his efforts to build a Vietnamese studies community at Yale. My wonderful fellow graduate students at Yale—far too many to thank individually here—were a constant source of inspiration and support. Special thanks to George R. Trumbull IV for his help and friendship since the very beginning, and to Haydon Cherry for good conversations and good times on three continents.

The knowledge, advice, and support of scholars of Vietnam and of French colonialism contributed enormously to this book. My deepest thanks to Mitch Aso, Jennifer Boittin, Pascal Bourdeaux, Trang Cao, Joshua Cole, J. P. Daughton, Naomi Davidson, George Dutton, Christina Firpo, Elizabeth Foster, Henri Francq, Gilles de Gantès, Christoph Giebel, Chi Ha, Alec Holcombe, Eric Jennings, Mark Lawrence, Christian Lentz, Jim Le Seuer, Pamela McElwee, Ed Miller, Michael Montesano, Cindy Nguyen, Lien-Hang Nguyen, Martina Nguyen, Nguyen Nguyet Cam, Lorraine Paterson, Jason Picard, Helen Pho, Paul Sager, Gerard Sasges, Hue-Tam Ho Tai, Keith Taylor, Michele Thompson, Nhung Tuyet Tran, Tuong Vu, Chris Wheeler, Owen White, John Whitmore, and Peter Zinoman for their help over the years. A few other people deserve special thanks. I am particularly grateful to Claire Trần Thị Liên and Peter Hansen, both for their groundbreaking work on twentieth-century Vietnamese Catholic history and for sharing with me their knowledge and ideas about our mutual research interest for many years. Shawn McHale kindly served as a reader for the dissertation on which this book is based. Christopher Goscha read the entire manuscript and offered crucial comments and encouragement, as he has done for so many people in the field of Vietnamese studies. Finally, thanks to Bradley Davis for our occasionally meandering and irreverent but always memorable conversations about Vietnamese history, all too many of them at our favorite bia hơi on Dã Tượng Street in Hanoi, now a casualty of the inexorable march of history (it is now a branch of Vietcom Bank).

This book would not exist without the generous financial support of many institutions. I am particularly grateful to the Blakemore-Freeman Foundation for allowing me to spend 2004–5 studying Vietnamese in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, and to the Fulbright-Hays program and the Social Science Research Council for the funding that allowed me to carry out the bulk of the research for this book. At Yale, my thanks to the Department of History, the Council on Southeast Asian Studies, the MacMillan Center, and International Security Studies for grants allowing me to study Vietnamese at the Southeast Asian Summer Studies Institute and to carry out early research, and to the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation for its support during the year I wrote my dissertation. At Michigan State University, the Department of History and the College of Social Science provided essential support during later stages of the research and writing.

My research for this book has taken me to many wonderful archives and libraries. In Vietnam, I would especially like to thank the Viện Việt Nam Học và Khoa Học Phát Triển for sponsoring my visas to study Vietnamese and for facilitating introductions to the institutions where I worked. My thanks to the directors and staffs of the National Archives Center I in Hanoi and Center II in Ho Chi Minh City, the National Library of Vietnam in Hanoi, and the General Sciences Library in Ho Chi Minh City for access to their collections. The Institute of Religion and the Ecole Française d’Extrême-Orient in Hanoi are wonderful places to work and to meet other scholars, and I would like to thank their directors, Đỗ Quang Hưng and Andrew Hardy, for welcoming me. I would also like to thank the former archbishop of Hanoi, Joseph Ngô Quang Kiệt, and the archbishop of Ho Chi Minh City, Cardinal Jean-Baptiste Phạm Minh Mẫn, for graciously receiving me during my visits to both archdioceses. In France, I owe a great deal of thanks to the late Père Gérard Moussay of the Société des Missions Etrangères de Paris for granting me access to the society’s private archives and library, and to Brigitte Appavou for helping me navigate the collections. I would also like to thank the directors and staffs of the Archives Nationales d’Outre-Mer, the archives of the Société de Saint-Sulpice, the archives of the Ministère des Affaires Etrangères, the archives of the Service Historique de l’Armée de la Terre, the Bibliothèque de l’Institut Catholique de Paris, the Bibliothèque de Documentation Internationale Contemporaine, the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, and (in Italy) the Archivio Storico della Congregazione per l’Evangelizzazione dei Popoli.

My colleagues at Michigan State University have welcomed me since my arrival in East Lansing, and they helped this book continue to grow until the very end. Thanks in particular to David Bailey, Liam Brockey, Pero Dagbovie, Walter Hawthorne, Leslie Moch, Ed Murphy, Ethan Segal, Lewis Siegelbaum, Aminda Smith, Ben Smith, Michael Stamm, and John Waller. I am fortunate that this book found a home with the University of California Press, which has long been a strong supporter of scholarship in the field of Vietnamese studies, and I am especially lucky to have worked with Niels Hooper and his outstanding editorial staff. Thanks to the two anonymous referees of the manuscript for their excellent comments. Finally, special thanks to Christopher Goscha and Fredrik Logevall, coeditors of the series in which this book appears, for their support of this project.

In retrospect, I think that I first began to consider becoming a historian in the classroom of Matthew Ostoyich, my history teacher in the eleventh and twelfth grades, whose example I will always remember. The history department at Cornell University was a wonderful place to learn the discipline as an undergraduate: thanks to Daniel Baugh, Stuart Blumin, and John Weiss for being such wonderful teachers. Friends from all walks of life have helped me to focus on this book, or to forget about it for a little while, when finishing it seemed beyond me. Thanks to Bob Berstein, Mat Blackman, Matt Bruntel, Ken Cunningham, Cyrus Dhalla, Jake Kramer, Peter Lallas, Jake Lundberg, Naresh Manjanath, Tom Pepinsky, Johanna Ransmeier, Aaron Rester, Noah Smith, Joe Spinelli, Jeremy Taylor, and especially Matthew Mozian for nearly three decades of true friendship. Landon Carter Schmitt, we all miss you.

Even after writing so much, I am unable to find the words to thank my family and my wonderful in-laws. I always have been and always will be standing on your shoulders. I have been especially blessed to know my four grandparents well into my adult life. Knowing them has allowed me experience my own history in a way that many people never have the chance to do, and I will forever be grateful for the gift. And, most important of all, I give all of my love to Helen and to our daughter Clara, who are the beginning of my everything.

FOREWORD

Scholarship on the history of Catholicism in Vietnam has experienced a renewal since the end of the Cold War and the social and economic transformations of the market reform era in Vietnam. Over the last two decades, a growing number of scholars have provided nuanced accounts of Catholicism from its arrival in Vietnam in the seventeenth century to the present day. Missing in this new historiography, however, has been one very important period, arguably the most important one, namely the transition during the colonial period from a foreign-administered mission to an independent national Church. With his new book Catholic Vietnam, Charles Keith fills in this gap and in so doing provides us with a brilliant analysis of the sociocultural and political nature of this transformation and its complex consequences. He also provides us with powerful insights into modern Vietnamese history.

Drawing upon an impressive array of colonial, missionary, Vatican, and especially Vietnamese sources, Keith demonstrates the extent to which colonial rule created increasingly fractious relationships among Vietnamese Catholics, European missionaries, and French officials. At the same time, he situates his analysis within the social, economic, and cultural changes occurring inside Vietnam affecting relationships among Vietnamese Catholics and non-Catholics. If historians have paid close attention to the famous uprisings crushed by the French at Yên Bái and Nghệ An in 1930–31, Keith is the first to draw our attention to the significance of the ordination of the first Vietnamese bishop, Nguyễn Bá Tòng, in 1933. In the wake of World War II, the ordination of another famous bishop, Lê Hữu Từ, and his early support of Hồ Chí Minh left no doubt that much had changed among Vietnamese Catholics since the late nineteenth century. By the end of the Indochina War, Vietnamese—not Europeans—ran the dioceses of Hanoi, Bắc Ninh, Vinh, Hải Phòng, and Saigon. The dynamics of the colonial period, including its violent endgame, generated this religious decolonization.

But Keith goes further. He shows, for example, how colonialism created new transnational linkages, which Vietnamese Catholics could turn to their advantage. In a fascinating connection, he analyzes how the Vatican’s post–World War I efforts to build up national Churches in the non-Western world allowed indigenous religious elites to rethink their relations with European missionaries and the colonial powers. The changing nature of international Catholicism also provided Vietnamese Catholics with contacts as well as institutional, canonical, and modern means for imagining and building Catholic Vietnam.

In this landmark study, Charles Keith provides us with the first full-length account of Vietnamese Catholicism during the colonial period. It is with immense pleasure and gratitude that we welcome this book to our series. Specialists as well as general readers will find much of interest in this deeply researched, multidisciplinary, and beautifully crafted book. They might even walk away thinking a bit differently not only about the complexity of Vietnamese Catholicism, but also about Vietnam itself.

Christopher Goscha

Fredrik Logevall

Introduction

______

Hands bound, necks yoked, three Vietnamese Catholic priests stand surrounded by police, eyes averted, waiting to be photographed (fig. 1). They have just emerged from 33 rue Lagrandière, the central prison of Saigon. After the picture is taken, they embark with their minders onto a waiting steamship. Their destination is the notorious French prison on Poulo Condore, an island off the coast of Cochinchina.

On the day this picture was taken, October 18, 1909, French colonial authorities had just convicted the three priests of numerous crimes. For more than a year, Nguyễn Thần Đồng, Nguyễn Văn Tường, and Đậu Quang Lĩnh had operated in their home province of Nghệ An as agents of Đông Du (Go East), a movement led by the revolutionary intellectual Phan Bội Châu. Its purpose was to recruit Vietnamese students to study in Japan and make them the foundation of an organization to unite anticolonial forces and overthrow French rule. The three priests entered Đông Du’s networks through Mai Lão Bạng, a fellow priest, before he left for Japan in 1906. Under the cover of ministering across Catholic parishes in Nghệ An, the priests collected money, distributed tracts, and recruited supporters for Đông Du. In their travels, they reportedly carried with them a photograph of Mai Lão Bạng with Phan Bội Châu and Cường Để, a prince of the defeated Nguyễn dynasty who hoped to return from exile in Japan to assume the throne at the head of an independent Vietnam, as well as letters from Vietnamese clergy calling on Catholics to fight against French rule. One of them read, Nowadays the nation is lost, the Lord (Jesus) is no longer protected, the Church is also in danger. To protect the Lord, we must maintain the nation, we must fight the French. … Christian followers should contribute by any means, labour or property, in the struggle against the French, so as to show patriotism and love of the Lord.¹

FIGURE 1. Three priests arrested for anti-French activities, 1909. Société des Missions Etrangères de Paris.

News of these activities soon spread to missionaries and colonial officials, both of whom began to watch the priests closely. In May 1909, a missionary caught the priests with incriminating documents and informed French officials, and in mid-June the priests were placed on trial in the provincial capital of Vinh. They initially denied involvement, but the documents found in their quarters and the testimony of fellow priests and lay Catholics, obtained through interrogation over the month since their arrest, ultimately led them to confess. The three priests were sentenced to nine years imprisonment and hard labor. They remained in Vinh until early September, when they were sent south on their journey to Poulo Condore. Mai Lão Bạng, convicted in absentia two months earlier, avoided arrest until 1914, when he was arrested in Hong Kong and sent to join his three compatriots. Mai Lão Bạng, Nguyễn Thần Đồng, and Đậu Quang Lĩnh were not released until 1918. Nguyễn Văn Tường died in prison.²

During the colonial era, French officials, missionaries, and Vietnamese Catholics lived through changes and conflicts like these that ended European religious and political authority over Vietnamese Catholic life and transformed the place of the Church in Vietnamese society and politics. That is the focus of this study. It demonstrates how French colonial rule allowed for the transformation of Catholic missions in Vietnam into broad and powerful economic and institutional structures in which race defined ecclesiastical and cultural prestige, control of resources, and institutional authority. This, along with colonial rule itself, created a culture of religious life in which relationships between Vietnamese Catholics and European missionaries were less equal and more fractious than ever before. However, the colonial era also created unprecedented ties between Vietnam and the transnational institutions and culture of global Catholicism, as Vatican reforms to create an independent national Church helped Vietnamese Catholics to reimagine and redefine their relationships to both missionary Catholicism and to colonial rule itself. Much like the myriad revolutionary ideologies and struggles in the name of the Vietnamese nation, this revolution in Vietnamese Catholic life was ultimately ambiguous, even contradictory: it established the foundations for an independent national Church in Vietnam, but it also polarized the place of this new Church in postcolonial politics and society and produced deep divisions between Vietnamese Catholics themselves.

PAST AND PRESENT

When the French finally arrested Phan Bội Châu in 1925, they organized a spectacular trial in Hanoi during which prosecutors presented the aging revolutionary’s life as a public parable of the immorality and futility of opposition to France’s civilizing mission. But in the case of the three priests who had supported Phan Bội Châu, missionaries and colonial officials did their best to downplay, or even hide, the details of the affair to Catholic communities and the broader public; if it had not been for the efforts of a few left-wing newspapers eager to criticize the Church, the affair likely would not have seen the light of day.³ This was because the affair raised troubling questions about French relationships with a Catholic community that missionaries and colonial officials had long thought of, and represented as, loyal subjects. Colonial officials worried that to make an example of the three Đông Du priests would further strain relations with missionaries and Vietnamese Catholics, many of whom were now critical of colonial rule after a generation of political repression and economic exploitation by an often ardently secular French republican regime. For their part, missionaries knew that the political acts of the priests were inseparable from the tensions that had emerged between European and Vietnamese Catholics over that same generation, when missionary expansion limited Vietnamese autonomy in both the spiritual and worldly aspects of their Church like never before. As such, missionaries worried that making an example of the priests would make them martyrs, dead indictments of the missionary enterprise. Unlike in the case of Phan Bội Châu, the story of the priests had no value as a missionary or colonial morality play. It could only raise questions about the myth of a Catholic community in Vietnam united across races and predisposed by faith to welcome French tutelage.

The deep tensions and divisions in Catholic life in colonial Vietnam were apparent, even glaringly evident, to ordinary peasants, the Vietnamese clergy, missionaries, colonial officials, and Church authorities in Rome at the time. Nevertheless, the myth of a culturally foreign and procolonial/antinational Church continues to loom large in public and scholarly understandings of Vietnamese Catholic history. This myth has its roots in the era of the Nguyễn unification and the French conquest, a time when Catholics were at the very center of profound political and social upheaval in Vietnam. To be sure, theological, social, and political conflict had regularly surrounded Catholicism since the religion first arrived in the two Vietnamese kingdoms, Đàng Trong and Đàng Ngoài, in the sixteenth century. Many Vietnamese rulers worried that a monotheistic religion would cause discord in a religiously plural society, were concerned that Catholic proscriptions against ancestral worship undermined the foundations of the Confucian political order, and worried about the social authority, scientific knowledge, and international connections of foreign missionaries. Thus Vietnamese rulers at times, and especially in times of discord or conflict, issued edicts calling for the destruction of Church property and the imprisonment or execution of Catholics. Official and popular attitudes toward the religion, however, were far more often benign. This was largely because by the end of the eighteenth century Catholicism had become a well-established part of the spiritual and social landscape, especially in the northern kingdom of Đàng Ngoài, and its appeal had grown beyond the socially and economically marginalized and reached other parts of Vietnamese society, including even some ruling families.⁴ Official tolerance and social normalization was possible because virtually all Vietnamese Catholics and missionaries in the early modern era did not question the legitimacy of the Vietnamese political order. Indeed, Confucian conceptions of social hierarchies and relationships were the base for Catholic understandings of the essential sovereignty of Vietnamese emperors.⁵

Catholicism’s place in Vietnamese society and politics deteriorated rapidly after the unification of the two Vietnamese kingdoms under the Nguyễn prince Nguyễn Phúc Ánh, who in 1802 defeated an uprising led by the Tây Sơn brothers that had overthrown the ruling dynasties in both kingdoms, and established his rule as the Gia Long emperor over all Vietnamese territories. Gia Long remained tolerant of Catholicism, thanks in large part to his growing ties while in exile during the Tây Sơn era to French Catholic bishops, who hoped to create more favorable conditions for Catholicism by supporting the exiled prince. Most famous was Pigneau de Béhaine, who appealed for French military intervention on behalf of the prince, and when it did not arrive rallied his own small army that fought alongside the prince’s forces. Despite favorable beginnings, tolerance quickly vanished under Gia Long’s successor, Minh Mạng, who sought to transform the new kingdom into a regional imperial power by means of a restructuring and modernization of the imperial bureaucracy, agricultural expansion, military conquests, and a revitalization of the ideological and ritual aspects of Confucian imperial rule. In doing so, Minh Mạng sought to bring a range of groups on the kingdom’s geographic and cultural margins, Catholic and other, under greater control during the 1820s and 1830s.

Two related but distinct external developments rapidly made Catholicism the primary concern of Minh Mạng and his successors to the Nguyễn throne. The first was the rapid growth of the presence in Vietnam of the Société des Missions Etrangères de Paris, or MEP, in the mid-nineteenth century, a moment of extraordinary growth in global French missionary activity. This expanded the resources and reach of missions precisely when the Nguyễn sought to expand the control of the imperial buraucracy and military over the kingdom’s populations. This in turn led many Catholics to resist the challenge that they felt Nguyễn rule posed to their spiritual and social autonomy, which they did through bribery of officials and participation in anti-Nguyễn uprisings. This then led the Nguyễn court to levy increasingly harsher proscriptions against the religion and its adherents. The second external development was the growing presence of the French navy in Asia, which during the 1840s began to exercise gunboat diplomacy regularly to protect French missionaries from growing Nguyễn repression. This only confirmed Nguyễn fears that Catholics were a potential conduit for external influence in Vietnam, and the court’s repression of Catholics intensified.

During the 1850s, as the rise of British power in Asia and the growth of an industrial economy led the French to consider more direct intervention in the region, missionaries played an important role in convincing the French emperor, Napoleon III, to attack the Nguyễn kingdom in 1858. The war that followed resulted in the French conquest of lower Cochinchina in 1862, France’s first foothold in the Nguyễn kingdom. Although official Nguyễn repression of Catholics sharply declined after the conquest of Cochinchina, primarily with the hope of negotiating a retrocession of lost territories, the relations between Catholics and other parts of Vietnamese society largely broke down, leading to a wave of communitarian violence in the years after the conquest. For reasons ranging from self-preservation to vengeance, some missionaries and Vietnamese Catholics lent significant support to Francis Garnier’s failed invasion of Tonkin in 1873 and 1874, as well as during France’s war with the Nguyễn and the Qing Empire in China from 1883 to 1885 that led to French protectorates over Annam and Tonkin, the remainder of the Nguyễn kingdom. During the final collapse of Nguyễn rule in the 1880s, tens of thousands of Catholics died in another terrible wave of communitarian violence.

The complex position of the Catholic Church in Vietnamese society and politics during the transition from Nguyễn to French rule has dominated writings on Vietnamese Catholicism since that time. Nguyễn annals, edicts, and memorials, as well as most writings by Vietnamese officials and literati about Catholicism from the nineteenth century, reflect the political and ideological position of a class of people who stood to lose enormously from French colonial rule. In these writings, Catholicism is typically described as a heretical religion (tả đạo) and its followers as deeply subversive, if not traitorous, and inherently external to what was a largely elite, state-centered view of what it meant to be Vietnamese. In sharp contrast, MEP histories and biographies from the colonial era describe Catholics as martyrs, victims of a pagan regime and society who were guilty of nothing more than a wish to worship their faith. MEP writings, of course, reflect an equally clear and urgent agenda. During the French conquest, missionaries used writings not only to bear witness to Vietnamese Catholic suffering but also to court financial support from French Catholics and diplomatic and military support from French officials. MEP histories and biographies thus echoed Vietnamese writings from this era in their view that there existed elemental and unbridgeable differences between Catholics and the rest of Vietnamese society, and that it was natural for Vietnamese Catholics to desire and support French tutelage.⁶ Ironically, MEP writings later in the century expressed the same view but with a very different purpose: to defend Catholic missions in their conflicts with the colonial state at a time when the rise of the secular Third Republic worsened Church-state relations in France and its empire.⁷

As Christopher Goscha has shown, the expansion of colonial rule created new networks, mobilities, and imaginaries that led more and more Vietnamese to think of and meaningfully experience Annam, or Vietnam, as a cultural and material reality.⁸ One important part of this change was a body of new French historical scholarship, whose Western model of national history helped to form many foundational narratives of Vietnamese history. Many Vietnamese were heavily influenced by these ideas, and they also began to conceive of their past in national terms, albeit in different ways and for different ends. Indeed, French rule led to intense introspection among anticolonial intellectuals, who sought historical and cultural explanations to understand and to change the current state of what they increasingly thought of as a nation. Phan Bội Châu, perhaps because of his close ties to Catholics such as Mai Lão Bạng and the Cochinchinese landowner and intellectual Gilbert Trần Tránh Chiếu, was one of the first Vietnamese after the conquest era to question prevailing views of Catholics as culturally separate and procolonial. In his 1905 Viẹt Nam vong quốc sư (History of the loss of Vietnam), Châu did not deny the collaboration of some Vietnamese Catholics with the French, but he blamed it on missionaries for exploiting religion for political ends and on anti-Catholic elements in Vietnam for allowing anti-Catholicism to divide the nation. Châu, in Mark McLeod’s words, thus "sought to emphasize those features of the Vietnamese that were more profound than mere religious preferences, such as membership in a unique ‘race’ (giong noi), the fraternal affection felt by those who shared common origins and upbringing (cung de, cung nuoi), and particularly a common exploitation by French colonialism."⁹ Châu’s views, of course, were just as political as those of the Nguyễn and the French: his assumption that a Vietnamese nation united by a shared political objective was a historical and cultural fact left no room for the multiple, often bitterly opposed visions of the Vietnamese nation that would emerge during the long, terrible transition from colonial rule.

Modern historiography on Vietnamese Catholicism, written in the shadow of the highly politicized role of the Catholic Church during the wars of decolonization in Vietnam, has done little to complicate this nation-centered binary of exclusion and inclusion. During the First Indochina War from 1946 to 1954, the enthusiasm of Vietnamese Catholics for independence evolved into widespread opposition to the communist-led movement at the head of both the revolutionary regime of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) in Tonkin and Annam and the anti-French resistance in Cochinchina. After the defeat of the French and the great power partition of Vietnam at the Geneva Conference in 1954, about two-thirds of northern Vietnam’s roughly eight hundred thousand Catholics left the heartland of Vietnamese Catholicism for the southern Republic of Vietnam (RVN) in a mass exodus that came to be known as the Northern Migration (Bắc di cư). Those who remained in the DRV experienced regular, often severe restrictions and repression from the communist state. During the Second Indochina War, or the Vietnam War, from 1954 to 1975, many Catholics strongly supported southern regimes, most notably that of Ngô Đình Diệm, the first president of the RVN and part of an illustrious Catholic family. The relationship between Catholics and the state was tense after the communist victory in 1975 and remains so today, thanks to issues such as Vatican diplomacy, émigré politics, parochial education, and land rights.

The victory of Vietnamese communists and their allies in the wars of decolonization, and the widespread political opposition to communism in the Vietnamese Catholic community in the modern era, has shaped most contemporary understandings of Vietnamese Catholic history. The outcome of the Second Indochina War did much to normalize the DRV’s claims to sovereignty over the RVN before 1975, and the 1975 reunification of Vietnam, as historically and culturally self-evident events. This in turn helped to normalize a particular and highly ideological genealogy of Vietnamese nationalism that views communism as inheriting the mantle of the many movements of resistance to foreign invasion in Vietnamese history, and thus as the sole legitimate voice of modern Vietnamese nationalism. Western historians, whose criticisms of the American war effort led many to write from this perspective, wrote little about Vietnamese Catholicism during the Vietnam War. However, a few influential studies, based on published MEP texts and French archival documents from the 1860s and 1870s in Cochinchina, a time of brief but close cooperation between missionaries and naval officials, have done much to support the view of Vietnamese Catholics as a uniformly procolonial, and by extension antinational, community in Western scholarship.¹⁰

Modern Vietnamese-language historiography, especially on politically charged subjects, has long borne the weighty imprint of the legitimating narratives and priorities of the communist party-state. As Patricia Pelley argues about the ongoing project of imagining and consolidating an acceptable and useful vision of national history, representations of the national past had to correspond with the political and intellectual exigencies of postrevolutionary and postcolonial times, and these were constantly in flux.¹¹ Because of this, Vietnamese historians have had difficulties in their treatment of many historical subjects: national origins, Chinese legacies, ethnic minorities, popular culture, and regionalism, among others. However, their treatment of Catholics is particularly Janus-faced. On one hand, the political need to claim that all parts of Vietnamese society supported the communist revolution has produced a historiographical imperative to find evidence of Phan Bội Châu’s claim of Catholic national belonging. This not only has led canonical Marxist historians such as Trần Văn Giàu and Trần Huy Liệu to sidestep subjects like the role of the Church during the French conquest, the Bắc di cư, and Catholic anticommunism, but it has also meant a regular effort since 1945 to valorize politically laudable Catholics such as the Đông Du priests, often described as the three patriot priests (ba vị linh mục yêu nước) in modern Vietnamese-language historiography.

National histories need enemies, however, and Catholics have also played an outsized role as antinational fifth columnists in much modern Vietnamese historiography. In this work, conquest-era conceptions of Catholics provide a powerful geneaology for modern critics of Catholic politics during decolonization and reunification, who interpret the anticommunism of many Catholics as simply a new version of their nineteenth-century French connection. The result is a seamless narrative of Catholicism as a culturally external, politically subversive presence in the national community from the distant past to the present day. Drawing on Marxist understandings of the relationship between Christianity and capitalism, much of this historiography views the missionary presence in Vietnamese kingdoms as far back as the seventeenth century as evidence of later French colonial ambitions in Vietnam.¹² This scholarship writes away Nguyễn-era communitarian violence as an a priori defense of the nation against colonialism, and it views the regimes in the RVN, which many Catholics supported, as puppets of America’s neocolonial ambitions. This historiography is also careful to laud Catholics such as the three Đông Du priests as a way to hold out the possibility for reconciliation between Catholics and the nation. However, idealized renderings of patriotic Catholics in these works usually implicitly underscore the yawning gap between most of their coreligionists and the understandings of Vietnamese national identity that dominate this scholarship. One good example of this was a conference on Vietnamese Catholic history in Ho Chi Minh City in 1988, held in context of the Vatican’s controversial canonization of 117 missionary and Vietnamese martyrs, many of whom appear in modern historiography as traitors and spies. Although one of the seventeen essays in the resulting volume lionizes the contribution of Vietnamese Catholics to the construction and defense of the nation, others pillory Vietnamese Catholics as imperialist lackeys.¹³

Since the First Indochina War, a small number of Vietnamese Catholics and missionaries have written histories of their religious community in a contradictory but equally political light. Although some confessional historiography laid important foundations for the modern social and religious history of Vietnamese Catholicism, much of it reduces the subject to a litany of persecutions and martyrdoms with explicit parallels to the history of the early Christians. In histories by Catholic scholars such as Phan Phát Huồn, the precolonial era often becomes a story of anti-Catholic edicts, imprisonments, and executions that, ironically, often unintentionally evokes Nguyễn imperial historiography. This history also often avoids difficult questions about the Church’s role in the French conquest or its relationship to the French colonial regime, focusing instead on the anticlericalism of many colonial administrators as well as simmering popular anti-Catholicism. The strongest words in these works are reserved, of course, for communism, cast as an oppressive force, intolerant of the many legitimate anticolonial and nationalist voices that did not share the party’s vision for the nation. In these narratives, Catholics such as the three Đông Du priests appear not as supporters of the communist party’s political values but as embodiments of the Vietnamese Catholic nationalism that communism oppressed during and after the First and Second Indochina Wars.¹⁴

Since the 1990s, changing conditions for research have produced a body of scholarship that has begun to move the historiography on Vietnamese Catholicism away from past polemics. One major reason for this was the opening in the early 1990s of the archives of the Société des Missions Etrangères de Paris to scholars outside the Church. Combining MEP archives with dynastic chronicles and a range of early modern materials, scholars such as Nola Cooke, Alain Forest, and Nhung Tuyet Tran have written the first nonconfessional social and cultural histories of Vietnamese Catholicism before the nineteenth century, and Laurent Burel and Jacob Ramsay have begun to meaningfully explore the relations between the Church, the Nguyễn state, and Vietnamese society in the nineteenth century.¹⁵ In Vietnam, during the ongoing emergence of the discrete conceptual and methodological field of religious studies (tôn giáo học), embodied by the founding of the journal Nghiên Cứu Tôn Giáo (Religious research) in 1999, Nguyễn Quang Hưng has led a more tempered reevaluation of the nineteenth century, and Nguyễn Hồng Dương has written the first serious social and economic studies of Catholic village life.¹⁶ James P. Daughton has recently shown how metropolitan Church-state conflicts made relationships between missionaries and colonial officials complex and often antagonistic.¹⁷ Finally, important recent studies by Claire Trần Thị Liên and Peter Hansen explore the range of contexts, from political to theological, that shaped Vietnamese Catholic experience during the First Indochina War and the Bắc di cư.¹⁸ However, there remains no comprehensive study of what is arguably the most critical question in the modern history of Vietnamese Catholicism: the transition from missionary authority to an independent national Church, which paralleled the rise and fall of colonial rule, and the cultural and political nature and consequences of this transformation.

Scholars such as David Marr, Hue-Tam Ho Tai, and Alexander Woodside have explored the relationships between the political, economic, and ideological structures of French colonial rule and social and cultural transformations in Vietnam, as well as the lasting legacies of this in the postcolonial era. However, scholars attempting to understand the Vietnamese experience of the global process often labeled colonial modernity have left religion largely underexplored. This is because, as Anne Hansen argues in her recent study of Buddhism in colonial Cambodia, religions cross national and regional borders, they involve translation of texts and ideas across linguistic boundaries, and they are not secular, as modern political discourses of the nation supposedly are. As she concludes, the re-enchantment of our understanding of the colonial world in Southeast Asia may be necessary if we are to understand the diverse ways in which people have experienced the shift to modern ways of thinking and being.¹⁹ This study of Catholic modernity in Vietnam draws from a broad body of literature that approaches the questions of power and hegemony in missionary encounters in terms of both culture and political economy.²⁰ It therefore considers Catholic missions in Vietnam as colonial institutions in a broad sense, but it does so emphatically not to participate in the conflation of political critique and historiography that has long surrounded Vietnamese Catholic history—what Frederick Cooper has described as the politics of naming.²¹ If anything, the focus of this study is Catholic decolonization in Vietnam, a process in which—to again borrow Cooper’s words—ideologies of imperial inclusion and differentiation were challenged by people acting within the ideological and political structures of empire, as well as by people who tried to defend or create a political space wholly outside.²²

STRUCTURE

In many ways, the life stories of the Đông Du priests parallel how this work approaches its subject. Đồng, Tường, and Lĩnh, who were born between 1852 and 1870, grew up in a time of transformation and upheaval in Vietnamese Catholic life. From the 1850s until the 1880s, the missionary presence in Vietnam roughly tripled. From the 1880s until their arrest in 1909, it roughly tripled again. The expansion of missionary authority in Vietnam had great consequences for Vietnamese Catholics and their place in society. As youths, the priests experienced violence, displacement, and the destruction of Catholic communities at the hands of Nguyễn officials and non-Catholics, which led some of their coreligionists to support French military campaigns against Nguyễn authority. The second half of their lives before their arrest was equally transformative, as the rise of French colonial rule allowed for an influx of manpower and resources to help rebuild and extend Catholic missions. Although the extension and consolidation of French rule did offer Catholics some opportunities, whether by facilitating or directly supporting a rebuilding of religious life or giving Catholics positions in the nascent colonial regime, ordinary Catholics, most of whom had nothing to do with the rise of French rule, paid a heavy price for the ties between missions and colonial authorities. Chapter 1 begins with an overview of Catholic religious and social structures in the precolonial era and then explores the nature of mission expansion, which began in the mid-nineteenth century and continued throughout the colonial era. It ends with an exploration of the relationship between Catholic missions, the rise of French colonial rule, and the changing place of Catholicism in Vietnamese politics and society during the nineteenth century.

On the surface, the lives of Đồng, Tường, and Lĩnh in the early colonial era were much better than they had been before. In addition to benefiting from greater physical safety, they studied in better seminaries than had the previous generation of Vietnamese priests. Meanwhile, the children they ministered to had greater access to catechism and lay education, and many new churches were springing up around them. But not all was well in their religious community on the eve of their decision to join an anti-French movement. Problems started with the bishop, whose inability to manage personnel and money led him to move clergy arbitrarily from place to place, to assign multiple clergy to the same congregations, leaving others unstaffed, and to calculate budgets so poorly that seminaries ran out of money to buy food one month into the term, forcing the mission to sell valuable land to make up the deficit. The behavior of some missionaries was also scandalous. One reportedly took a wife and had children (and not only with his wife), which was a source of great amusement to non-Catholics, who poked their heads into the church when he baptized babies to comment that the babies looked like him. Many of the priests’ parishioners complained about being under the authority of a missionary of such dubious moral character.²³ Yet they, and the priests themselves, were now more firmly under missionary authority than ever before. While the three priests all held important positions, missionaries determined their duties and access to resources, just as they by and large controlled the mission’s budgets and relations with political authorities. The priests also lived in a religious community in which most missionaries now lived and ate apart from the local clergy, and in which racial difference shaped the most basic aspects of daily life. And the relationship of missions with both the colonial state and local society remained difficult. The rise of political anticlericalism in France during the 1880s intensified conflicts over the disparate agendas of Church and state in the colony, while the many long-standing patterns of communitarian conflict in local society did not disappear with colonial rule. These changes are the focus of chapter 2, which is organized around three ongoing sources of conflict in Catholic life during the early colonial era: communitarian relations, tensions between Catholic missions and the colonial state, and fraying relations in Catholic life itself.

For colonial officials and missionaries both, the involvement of Đồng, Tường, and Lĩnh in revolutionary activities embodied