And I Shall Make of Thee a Great Nation: Vietnamese Catholic Bishops and the Birth of Catholic Vietnam, 1920-1945

Charles Keith, Ph.D. Candidate, Department of History, Yale University

Between the World Wars, Catholic communities in Vietnam became Catholic Vietnam, an imagined community of faith whose members, despite important differences that continued to shape their political and social identities, began to feel that they belonged to a single Vietnamese Catholic community, one with a unique place in the world Catholic Church. The idea and experience of Catholic Vietnam, rooted in the experience and memory of persecutions of Catholics in Vietnam during the nineteenth century, was born during the interwar period, as the Vatican turned towards planting Catholicism more firmly in colonial cultures as it contemplated its fading future within Europe, the number and influence of missionaries in colonial empires declined, the French colonial state?s extension into Vietnamese society prompted the growth of new political ideologies, and an exploding Vietnamese language print sphere brought new ideas, new means of communication and new forms of community into Vietnamese society. This paper examines the rise of the first Vietnamese Catholic bishops as a way to explore how changes in church, state and society intersected to produce the discursive and structural underpinnings of a Catholic Vietnamese identity, and considers the influence of this identity on Catholicism?s evolving relationship to the political upheavals andcultural debates of late colonial Vietnam.

In doing so, this paper hopes to continue to reexamine the relationship between religion and modernity in colonial Vietnam. The victory of the Vietnamese Communist movement over its political rivals in 1954 and its South Vietnamese and American opponents in 1975 has produced a political narrative of twentieth century Vietnamese history in which the rise of anti-colonial revolutionary ideology is dominant. This teleology affects understandings of cultural changes in Vietnamese society during the colonial period, resulting in accounts that too often separate religion, especially Catholicism, from Vietnam?s political and cultural modernity. This makes it harder to understand how Catholic ideas on cultural questions like gender, family life, science, and new forms of political community evolved in a Vietnamese Catholic community increasingly unified ? and often increasingly set apart from other communities ? by the Catholic print sphere and new forms of association and pilgrimage, strengthening the Church?s place in the lives of Vietnamese Catholics trying to navigate the political and cultural changes of their society.

In a broad sense, this paper uses the rise of the Vietnamese bishops to disassociate understandings of the public sphere in colonial societies from the trajectory of European state and class formation. In the radically different cultural and institutional context of Vietnamese society, as Shawn McHale argues, the public sphere reflected little of the idea, familiar to students of European history, of the public sphere as a space where ?people abandon private interest to discuss issues of public import?; instead, it acted primarily as a space ?where particularistic interests contested their views.? As such, Benedict Anderson?s classic argument of the growth of print capital as the driving force behind secularization and the weakening of particularized identites is inadequate for understanding identity formation in late colonial Vietnam: for Vietnamese Catholics, imagining their community was as much about drawing borders as it was about crossing them, a unique blending of the ?exteriorized mysticism? (the phrase is Victor Turner?s) of religious pilgrimage with the changing structures and relationships of modern life.

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