From Indochina to Vietnam v. 5. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012. xiv, 312 pp. (Illus.) US$49.95, cloth. ISBN 978-0-520-27247-7.
In the margin of the early China mission the first Catholic missionaries arrived in a politically divided Vietnam from the 1570s on. They had a history of modest results, frequent opposition, but sometimes also royal support in a kingdom that was united in the early nineteenth century. In the period from 1860 to 1880 French colonialism took over the administration of the country, although a nominal kingdom continued. In September 1940 Vietnam was occupied by the Japanese army. In September 1945, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam was proclaimed in Hanoi. It defeated the French army in 1954 and the Americans in 1975. Catholics never represented more than 10 percent of the population; this was at the end of the French colonial period. Nowadays the population is about 8.5 percent Catholic.
Keith concentrates in this book on the French period, 1860 to 1940. His first chapter explores the idea of the difference between the modest presence in the last period of independence, the Nguyen Kingdom, and the strong growth during colonial administration. From 68 French missionaries in 1868, there were nearly 400 a generation later. In the vivid symbolic language he likes, he sees the contrast also in the “enormous cathedrals in the centers of Hanoi and Saigon, both completed in the 1880s” (30).
Chapter 2 presents “a colonial church divided.” It chronicles a long list of complaints by the Vietnamese people, most voiced by the clergy, about the French in general and especially their missionaries. One missionary loaned funds of his order to a colon[ist] for the sake of his family in France. Some were addicted to opium, or lived with Vietnamese women. There is even a story about a local priest who was accused of having killed a missionary who had tied him up and whipped him. Keith does not give a complete narrative, let alone much statistics and institutional history, but instead offers a series of stories that together build a picture.
Chapters 3 through 5 discuss the 1920s and 1930s, when the Vatican wanted to build a church, independent from French colonialism where anticlericalism, freemasonry and preference for Buddhism was often strong. In 1933 the first Vietnamese bishop was nominated, followed by two more in 1935 and 1938. Vietnamese priests began mission work in the tribal regions of the mountains in the west of the country. A Catholic press was established, magazines, newspapers and books in Vietnamese, printed in the adapted Latin alphabet as developed by the early missionary Alexandre de Rhodes (in Vietnam between 1627-1645). Catholicism was more an urban than a rural phenomenon: in 1897 one-third of Saigon’s 38,000 inhabitants were Catholic (153). In the 1920s the popular French Catholic organizations were also established in Vietnam: Association de Saint Vincent de Paul, Catholic Action, Catholic Boy Scouts, Eucharistic Crusade. Popular Catholicism developed through various places of pilgrimage, the most popular being La Vang.
Chapter 6 treats the political parties and actions by nationalist Catholics. Here again, the Vatican is a symbol of the international and non-French character of the Catholic Church. Religion is by many described and experienced as not bound to a specific ethnicity or geographical identity. Besides, the social message of the Popes Leo XIII and Pius XI was also interpreted as a criticism of French colonialism, “both by identifying French secularism as the root of radical mass politics and by focusing on how the oppressive nature of colonial rule had birthed and sustained communism in Vietnam” (200).
Chapter 7 discusses the most dramatic period of this history, the Japanese occupation of 1940, the declaration of independence of 1945 and the French attempt to come back to its former colony, resulting in the defeat of the French, the division of the country in 1954, and the unstable and corrupt government of the Saigon administration, for the first time under a Catholic president, Ngô Ðình Diệm. The epilogue bears as title “a national church divided,” an echo of the title of chapter 2. It is no longer the opposition of French versus Vietnamese clergy and faithful, but the Catholics of the North who in 1954 migrated to the South and caused many problems in this region. Here the book ends: without much theory, but again with symbolic and meaningful stories like the one about the use of the names of former Northern parishes for the new settlements in the South.
Charles Keith does not concentrate on religious history, but on social and political positions. He does not present the formal structure of the story, but gives anecdotes, quotes and symbolic events that are elaborated on in order to portray the tragic and dramatic lines of history during the hundred years between 1860 and 1960. He starts with an appalling photograph on page 2 of three Vietnamese priests arrested in 1909 for nationalist, anti-French activities. The last photograph, in the epilogue, is of Ngô Ðình Diệm, president of the (southern) Republic of Vietnam, side by side with his brother, who became archbishop of Hué, Pierre-Martin Ngô Ðình Thục.
One of the more theoretical issues discussed here is that of revisionism, the process of changing interpretations of persons as pro-French, nationalist, religious or socialist (180-183). While reading about the portrayal of the priest Trấn Lục (from a paragon of colonial cooperation to a true patriot) I was thinking about the negative portrayal given here to French colonialism and to the Communist rule: times they are a changing. Charles Keith has not given us an easy book, no dry bones, but in many episodes a living history resembling a Greek tragedy rather than a dull textbook for history classes.
Karel Steenbrink
Utrecht University, Utrecht, Netherlands
pp. 643-645