Catholic Vietnam: a church from empire to nation 9780520272477, 9780520953826

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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 1. Assuming the Burden: Europe and the American Commitment to War in Vietnam, by Mark Atwood Lawrence 2. Indochina: An Ambiguous Colonization, 1858-1954, by Pierre Brocheux and Daniel Hémery 3. Vietnam 1946: How the War Began, by Stein ‘Tennesson 4. Imperial Heights: Dalat and the Making and Undoing of French Indochina, by Eric T. Jennings 5. Catholic Vietnam: A Church from Empire to Nation, by Charles Keith

Catholic Vietnam A Church from Empire to Nation

Charles Keith

LH

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. London, England © 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.

px em: 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, 19191945, Journal of Vietnamese Studies 3, no. 2 (Summer 2008): 128-71, and are used here by permission of the University of California Press. ZA: "20°. AG: 35: 217. 216: 15; “id, 313 22 10° 305 38) 77. 363 “Sper? Se- De 4

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

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CONTENTS

List of Illustrations viii Acknowledgments ix

Foreword xiii Introduction 1

1. A Church between the Nguyén and the French 18

2. A Colonial Church Divided G5

3. The Birth of a National Church 88

4. Vietnamese Catholic Tradition on Trial 118

5. A National Church Experienced 147 6. The Culture and Politics of Vietnamese Catholic Nationalism 177

7. A National Church in Revolution and War 208

Notes 249 Bibliography 289 Index 305

Epilogue. A National Church Divided 242

ILLUSTRATIONS

1. Three priests arrested for anti-French activities,1909 2 2. Church in rural Tonkin, ca.1890 31 3. The execution of Pierre Borie, November 24, 1838 45 4. Tomb to Vietnamese martyrs, Tonkin, ca.1900 64 5. Statue of Pigneau de Béhaine and Prince Nguyén Phuc Canh, ca.1905 66 6. Nguyén Htiu Bai 99 7. Broadside of Pope Pius XI and the first two Vietnamese bishops, ca. 1935 110 8. Scene from the first Vietnamese adaptation of the Passion of Christ, 1913 137 9. Drawing from Vietnamese Catholic Youth bulletin, 1935 158 10. Postcard of the cathedral at Phat Diém and the tomb of Tran Luc (Pére Six), Ca. 1933 168 11. Young Catholic Workers brochure, 1939 199

12. Bishop Lé Htiu Tt inspecting his troops, 1952 217 13. Catholic refugees from Bui Chu awaiting transport to the south, 1954 244 14. Ngéd Dinh Diém and Ngé Dinh Thuc, 1961 246

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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 Ganteés, 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 1X

X ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

the years. A few other people deserve special thanks. I am particularly grateful to Claire Tran Thi Lién 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 hoi on Da Tugng 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 in-

stitutions. 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 Vién Viét Nam Hoc va Khoa Hoc Phat Trién 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 Francaise d’Extréme-Orient in Hanoi are wonderful places to work and to meet other scholars, and I would like to thank their directors, D6 Quang Hung and Andrew Hardy, for welcoming me. I would also like to thank the former arch-

bishop of Hanoi, Joseph Ng6 Quang Kiét, and the archbishop of Ho Chi Minh City, Cardinal Jean-Baptiste Pham Minh Man, for graciously receiving me during my visits to both archdioceses. In France, I owe a great deal of thanks to the late Pére Gérard Moussay of the Société des Missions Etrangéres 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 dOutre-Mer, the archives of the Société de SaintSulpice, the archives of the Ministére des Affaires Etrangeres, the archives of the

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Xi

Service Historique de Armée de la Terre, the Bibliotheque de l'Institut Catholique de Paris, the Bibliotheque de Documentation Internationale Contemporaine, the Bibliotheque 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.

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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 espe-

cially 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 Yén Bai and Nghé An in 1930-31, Keith is the first to draw our attention to the signifcance of the ordination of the first Vietnamese bishop, Nguyén Ba Tong, in 1933. In the wake of World War IJ, the ordination of another famous bishop, Lé Httu Tu, and his early support of H6 Chi Minh left no doubt that much had changed among Vietnamese Catholics since the late nineteenth century. By the end of the Xill

xiv FOREWORD

Indochina War, Vietnamese—not Europeans—ran the dioceses of Hanoi, Bac Ninh, Vinh, Hai Phong, 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 Lagrandiere, 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, Nguyén Than Dong, Nguyén Van Tudng, and Dau Quang Linh had operated in their home province of Nghé An as agents of Déng Du (Go East), a movement led by the revolutionary intellectual Phan Boi Chau. 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 Dong Du'’s networks through Mai Lao Bang, a fellow priest, before he left for Japan in 1906. Under the cover of ministering across Catholic parishes in Nghé An, the priests collected money, distributed tracts, and recruited supporters for Dong Du. In their travels, they reportedly carried with them a photograph of Mai Lao Bang with Phan Boi Chau and Cuong Dé, a prince of the defeated Nguyén 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

2 INTRODUCTION

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Indochine (Paris: Armand Colin, [1901-]1903), 481.

martyrs.'° And as mission printing presses catered to the growing body of literate Vietnamese Catholics, martyr histories and biographies became a staple of households and schools, making history out of the communitarian violence that, by the late colonial era, few could personally remember. In 1928, an article in Sacerdos Indosinensis, a journal devoted to supporting the local clergy, published a text for priests about how best to act in an encounter with local officials. It recalled the role of Nguyén officials in communitarian violence and urged readers to be wary of their recent peaceful attitude. The author urged priests to remind hostile officials that Catholics believed in separating the worldly and the spiritual realms, that Catholic priests did not involve themselves in politics, and that lay Catholics lived in ways that benefited all Vietnamese. This suggests at least that Catholic fears about the attitudes of local populations and officials persisted long after the French had reduced Nguyén rule to a shell of its former self. However, the author also suggested that priests emphasize the fact that Catholicism was not a “Western import” but rather in and of all nations.” This, a common defense against claims of colonial complicity, also reflected a new reality in mission-state relations at the turn of the century, when growing clashes between Catholics and French authorities in Vietnam had begun to fray the close political and cultural ties that had emerged during the conquest era.

A COLONIAL CHURCH DIVIDED 65

CATHOLIC MISSIONS AND COLONIAL STATE IN:-A REPUBLICAN EMPIRE On March 10, 1901, a crowd gathered in front of Saigon’s cathedral to unveil a statue of Pigneau de Béhaine, the MEP bishop who had helped Prince Nguyén Phuc Anh defeat Tay Son forces in 1802 (fig. 5). On that day, the French tricolor and patriotic music honored a Catholic bishop in a ceremony that was nonetheless explicitly republican in character, and colonial officials and missionaries both saluted “this man of large and fertile ideas who wanted that, in this Far East, the name of Frenchmen be synonymous with progress, civilization, and true liberty.” By casting de Béhaine as a part of the expansion of French colonialism in Vietnam, the statue evoked, in James P. Daughton’s words, “a bridge between France and its colonial peoples, between a love of nation and a love of God, and even between republican civilizing ideals and the goals of Christian charity.”” But not all were happy with the statue's symbolic implications. Indeed, even the proposal of the statue had led Camille Paris, a postal administrator and a prominent critic of Catholic missions, to accuse de Béhaine of making Vietnamese hate the French. Ten years later, former governor-general Jean de Lanessan wrote of de Béhaine and his fellow missionaries that “it was the ‘conquering and sovereign cross’ that they see in their dreams, not France extending its influence in the Far East.””’ The conflict over the statue of Pigneau de Béhaine is an apt marker of the complex place of Catholic missions in a colony of the secular Third Republic. The statue itself represented a belief, widespread among many missionaries and French officials throughout the colonial era, that Catholic missions and colonial rule were complementary parts of a single French endeavor to bring the benefits of Western civilization to the less fortunate. As Daughton argues, “by reveling in the rhetoric of imperialism, with its promises of civilizing savages and remaking the world in a distinctly French image, republican officials and Catholic missionaries smoothed over the great differences of traditions, ideals, and goals that separated them.” However, “the divisive nature of colonialism, with its concerns over budgets and disagreements about policies, meant that, in practice, missionaries and officials more often agreed to ignore each other than arrive at any real consensus.” Indeed, powerful ideological differences and competition for influence over the Vietnamese population meant that Catholic missions and the colonial state could often be each other's most bitter rivals. Monuments to the union of the Catholic and colonial civilizing missions dotted the landscape of Vietnam. One regular object of such efforts was the Jesuit missionary Alexander de Rhodes, who first came to Vietnam in 1627 and is regularly credited with inventing quoc ngti. For many missionaries, de Rhodes was an ideal origin myth to tie Vietnamese Catholicism to specifically French origins and thereby to claim that Catholic missions were essential partners in colonization. On

66 CHAPTER 2

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March 19, 1927, the three-hundredth anniversary of de Rhodes’ arrival, missions throughout Vietnam organized ceremonies to celebrate him and invited French officials to share in the celebrations. The inaugural issue of Sacerdos Indosinensis, the first journal for Vietnamese priests, was published that day to honor de Rhodes’s contributions not only to Vietnamese Catholicism but also to France.” Many outside the missions also saw de Rhodes as an early acolyte of colonial influence. The general and scholar Auguste Bonifacy wrote that de Rhodes, “in serving religion, helped science and civilization progress” and had given France “the most important role in the Indochinese peninsula.” In 1941, a Franco- Vietnamese

committee used state funds to honor de Rhodes with a pagoda in Hanoi and a stele incised with a narrative of his life and career. In a speech at the unveiling, one French official described de Rhodes as devoted to “the intellectual union of White and Yellow people” and “the spiritual union of Orient and Occident.”

Martyrs were another regular focus of narratives of the missionary-colonial union. On the one-hundredth anniversary of the birth of the missionary martyr Théophane Vénard, killed in Tonkin in 1861, a large and solemn ceremony cast his life as an ultimate sacrifice not only for his faith, but also for France's glory in Vietnam. A missionary named Menne told the story of Vénard’s death: “Théophane

A COLONIAL CHURCH DIVIDED 67

received the first blow. It was only an attempt; the skin was barely broken. The second strike, better placed, separated the head almost entirely and overturned at the same time the martyr and the pyre. The executioner, seeing his saber chipped, took another one and completed his task, after which he grabbed the head by the ear and held it up to show to the presiding lieutenant colonel.’ Vénard’s last words before the fatal blow of the sword were “If Annam kills me, I will with joy shed my blood for it.” Menne seized upon this last phrase to describe what he saw as the true meaning of Vénard’s sacrifice. “By the word and by example, and by all the means that evoke patriotism and faith,’ he wrote, “let us love together this dear Annam by giving her the true Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, who make France ‘the most beautiful kingdom after the kingdom of heaven; and who will be no less generous for... the Protectorate and our colony in the Far East, which the beneficent intercession of the blessed Théophane Vénard will always watch over.” Other cultural projects allowed metropolitan audiences to celebrate missionary contributions to empire. During the planning of the 1931 colonial exposition in Vincennes, influential priests and pro-Catholic industrialists and intellectuals lobbied to fund a pavilion to Catholic missions in the French empire. In addition to a flood of statistics and photos touting the contributions of mission schools, hospitals, and charitable institutions to colonial rule, it included a church where visitors could attend mass. The grounds also included a bell tower, which was flanked on all sides by statues representing “the four great human races” (white, black, Asian, and Latin) and topped with a luminous cross that shone over the exposition. The exposition hall also contained a crypt to honor the sacrifices of martyrs. For some, the exposition thus became an occasion to reflect on what one observer called “the missionary epic,’ a story of spiritual conquest inseparable from the spread of France overseas.” Individual Vietnamese Catholics also became symbols of Franco- Vietnamese cultural and political cooperation. Perhaps the best example was Truong Vinh Ky. On December 6, 1937, the centennial of Ky’s birth, all colonial schools spent time teaching about him. On the same day, the governor of Cochinchina, the bishop of Saigon, and hundreds of guests attended a ceremony at Ky's birthplace in Bén Tre province. Several speeches echoed the words of the local parish priest, who described Ky as “the premier partisan of Franco-Annamite rapprochement.” “In evoking the memory of Pétrus Ky,’ said one French official, “may we not think of all those with whom he collaborated, and for whom he was often a friend and confidant—sailors, soldiers, administrators, merchants, priests, and all who wrote the first magnificent pages of the history of France in Asia.” At a speech at the Royal Palace in Hué, the intellectual Nguyén Tién Lang argued that Ky’s “Western” faith drove his “respect of authority and order” and drove his quest for “a revital-

ized Annam where a Franco-Annamite culture that was a synthesis of common ideals could flourish.” The priest Tran Luc (Pére Six), who had close ties to French

68 CHAPTER 2

authority during the conquest of Tonkin, was another regular symbol of FrancoVietnamese cooperation. As Armand Olichon, the head of the Union Missionnaire du Clergé de France, wrote in 1941, “At the moment when colonial problems are so present, it is useful to meditate on the lessons of the life of P. Six. If it is true that the politics of the future, in all civilized nations, is a politics of association, how could it not be in our interest to invoke and make use of collaborators as valuable as the priest of Phat Diem?” Representations such as these, although idealized and often hyperbolic, nevertheless illustrate the real ties between Catholic missions and French rule in Vietnam. Indeed, despite frictions between mission and French authorities that were present from the beginning, many missionaries and some Vietnamese Catholics continued to consider France a savior throughout the colonial era. French officials rewarded the devotion of some of these Catholics with the Legion of Honor, the highest honor of the republic. Although few French officials ever took the risk of defending Catholic missions too passionately, a mixture of sympathy and pragmatism made most of them generally accepting of their presence. High-level colonial officials tended to favor long-term relationships over a particular source of friction. Bishops, who were concerned with defending mission influence in a time of growing state power, were similarly apt to turn the other cheek. Missions undoubtedly benefited from a few vocal official supporters, such as Ernest Outrey, deputy to Cochinchina in the French National Assembly from 1911 to 1936 and a stalwart defender of the missions in his communications with colonial officials, in the press, and even in the Chamber of Deputies in Paris. Moments of pride or crisis such as national holidays, the outbreak of World War I, the assassination of the French president Paul Doumer (a former governor-general), or the rural uprisings in 1930-31 also strengthened relations, as did the masses, public ceremonies, and social functions that were a regular part of colonial life. Although the enormous expansion of the missionary presence at the end of the nineteenth century would have been unimaginable without colonization, Catholic educational, social, and medical institutions also undoubtedly helped colonization function. Accordingly, colonial officials continued to support some of these institutions well after the growth of the colonial state’s own infrastructure. Most notable of these were the Catholic upper primary schools, important gateways into the world of the colonial elite. In 1893, the bishop of Saigon wrote with satisfaction about students at the Institut Taberd, who “easily passed their exams and then obtained places in the administration or in business”” More modest dispensaries, orphanages, and leper colonies also received some support, although often for different reasons: one French official estimated that “missionaries ran these facilities ten times more cheaply than the colony could” and that “even if the administration could afford to replace missionary workers with lay ones, ‘particularly repulsive’

jobs... would be hard to fill” Missions received other material benefits from

A COLONIAL CHURCH DIVIDED 69

colonial authorities. Books, bells, statues, amulets, rosaries, chalices, communion wine, and other imports often received tax exemptions. Missionaries sometimes received reduced fares on state-run trains or passenger ships.” In times of flooding or famine, colonial officials sometimes facilitated subventions for disaster relief and granted concessions from state-owned land. To focus too closely on connections such as these, however, obscures the many things that not only separated Catholic missions and the colonial state but also put the two very much at odds with one another. One of the earliest examples of this after the French conquest came in 1888, when a French adventurer named CharlesDavid de Mayréna proclaimed himself king of the Sedang, an ethnic minority in the central highlands. Mayréna was briefly a concern for colonial officials when he threatened to turn to Britain or Germany if France did not recognize his authority, but his money soon ran out and he left “his people” for another adventure, dying soon after in Malaysia. Although Mayréna’s kingdom was short-lived, it had lasting consequences for mission-state relations. Missionaries served Mayréna as guides and interpreters, and despite their claim that they believed Mayréna acted with official sanction, many French officials felt that the MEP had used Mayréna to resist the spread of colonial influence in the region. Missionaries, for their part, felt that French claims about improving security and economic development were only cover for an effort to expel the MEP from the region. The Mayréna affair, one of the earliest causes célébres in colonial Indochina, prompted a flurry of antimission articles in the colonial press and led to a more systemic assessment by the new administration of missionary influence in remote areas.” As this episode suggests, the competition between mission building and state building after the consolidation of French rule quickly superseded the ties between colonial officials and missionaries forged in their common struggle against the Nguyén court. Although French officials had once welcomed missionary activism, which had helped weaken the Nguyén and had provided France with intelligence and manpower during the wars of conquest, missionaries now caused problems by alienating Vietnamese Catholics with their growing presence and heavy-handedness, by dragging colonial officials into judicial conflicts, and by resisting French economic and political expansion. As French officials exerted more control over land, this too became a problem, usually when French officials refused to approve the sale of land or ruled against Catholics in a dispute. For example, one missionary protested the French seizure of a plot of land belonging toa corrupt village mayor on the grounds that the mayor had already sold the mission a portion of the lands.” Colonial officials, to their displeasure, continued to have to intervene to protect missionaries, as in 1926, when French officials had to protect two missionaries in Cao Bang after they reportedly razed a local mayor’s house and tore out his sugarcane plants in an effort to collect on a debt.°° Some conflicts grew over the most mundane issues. In 1924, a missionary became embroiled with

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French officials over, of all things, the angle of a turn in a road that the colonial state had built through one Catholic village—the missionary deemed it too dangerous.” Elsewhere, French officials refused a request to build a church because it would be too close to a new airfield.” Just as many French officials in the early colonial era saw missions as a challenge to their authority, many missionaries criticized French rule. This had been true even in the 1860s and 1870s in Cochinchina, the era of closest cooperation between missions and French officials, and relations quickly worsened after their common enemies had been vanquished. Missionaries were devastated at French indifference to the last and worst wave of violence during the Sino-French War, when public disinterest in anguished missionary appeals for intervention stood in stark contrast to the support for Catholics during the French invasion of Cochinchina a generation earlier. But missionaries reserved their greatest anger for the military and naval officials who had done little to stop violence against Catholics in 1885, when about forty thousand Catholics were killed. Although missionaries often overstated what the French could have done to prevent these deaths, military and naval officials were at times either unwilling to intervene or plainly unsympathetic. General de Courcy, despite being a staunch Catholic himself, stated that Vietnamese Catholics “had considered themselves to be the masters of the country after the fall of Hue, and thus had put pagan villages in a terrible position’; his seizure of the Binh Dinh citadel was the only French action during the summer of 1885 in an area where tens of thousands of Catholics died.” In 1886, the French disarmed some Catholic parishes before their safety had been assured, which missionaries protested.” And in the 1890s, ongoing missionary efforts to arm Catholics annoyed French officials trying to limit the flow of weapons into the country.” Missionaries were also furious at the French decision to keep many Nguyén officials—many of whom had sanctioned or even organized violence against Catholics during the conquest—in power in Annam and Tonkin. This was true even of Paul-Fran¢ois Puginier, the most stalwart missionary defender of French rule. In 1890, Puginier enjoined prominent French Catholics to urge colonial officials to further dismantle the Nguyén state apparatus. Puginier, like virtually all missionaries, believed that mandarins were abusive of their power, unwilling to curb violence, and biased in their administration of justice. Puginier also believed that French officials, inexperienced, ignorant of local life, and unwilling to become involved in local conflicts, allowed abuses by mandarins to continue unchecked.” Puginier was right that many French officials tended to see religion as a simple issue of personal preference and were often reluctant to intervene in communitarian conflicts. However, since many Catholics interpreted unfavorable judgments from local officials or friction with nearby communities as anti-Catholic acts, they often concluded that colonial “inaction” was a form of complicity. And, beginning

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in the 1890s, ideological shifts in French politics and society seemed to confirm missionaries worst fears. As the bishop of Saigon wrote in 1893, “French Christians, far from preaching the excellence of their religion, are the first to denigrate it, to make fun of it, and even at times to impede those who teach it and observe it faithfully.” The bishop's comment reveals another powerful element in mission-state conflicts in colonial Vietnam. James P. Daughton has shown how in the generation before World War I, growing Church-state conflicts in France profoundly shaped interactions between missions and colonial administrations throughout the French empire. The republicans who came to power in France during the 1880s thought of the Catholic Church as, in Ralph Gibson’s words, “a State within a State,’ a bastion of superstition, ignorance and intolerance, a leadership that accepted no authority other than God, and an institution that intruded on the work of the government.” From then until about World War I, a bitter political struggle between Church and state ultimately limited the Churchs role in public education, required religious associations to be authorized by the state, ended state subventions of the Church, and made Church property into state property.” Many of the French officials and colons streaming into Vietnam in the late nineteenth century saw Catholic missions as a moral and institutional threat to the republic’s colony. As a result, for many Catholics in Vietnam during this era, the greatest threat to their religion seemed to be France itself. Calls to limit the Church's influence in Vietnam began to grow in the 1890s. Many came from the growing network of Masonic lodges, whose ranks included many colonial officials who filled the pages of newspapers such as Le Courrier d Haiphong, LIndépendance Tonkinoise, and Le Mékong, whose publishers and editors were Masons, with articles criticizing Catholic missions. Much like in France, anticlerical critiques of Catholic missions in Vietnam ranged from fair and measured criticisms to conspiracy theories often meant as little other than provocation. Most began with the premise that missionaries were agents of the Vatican with at best divided loyalties to France. Their tepid or false patriotism, combined with their zeal and intolerance, made them a force for discord with no regard for political or social stability, men who would murder, torture, enslave, and kidnap to advance their cause. Missionaries, so such criticisms went, obstructed economic development in the colony, enriched themselves on local labor, and used their power to force conversions and subvert French influence. Camille Paris spoke for many when he described Catholic schools as a tool for missions to keep “the Annamite in ignorance and the French in error” and “to infinitely retard the moral junction of these two peoples, which can only be accomplished outside of all religion?’ Although anticlericalism and colonial policy were far from one and the same, many French officials did believe that colonial rule should not depend on missionary institutions. Many also felt, often with reason and without

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any anticlerical animus, that missionaries could have destabilizing effects in local communities. Apart from a generally dim fin-de-siécle view of the Catholic Church, anticlerical voices expressed numerous specific concerns about missions. Perhaps the biggest was that the missions were not fully French, which to many seemed to mock missionary claims to be acting in France's interest. As Camille Paris wrote, “whomever they are and wherever they come from, they are all devoted only to Rome?” Few officials were this categorical, but many remained suspicious that foreigners might use the cover of Catholic missions to increase their own nation’s influence in a French colony. The biggest concern were Spanish Dominicans, who made up about a fifth of all missionaries in Vietnam and administered Bui Chu, Vietnam's most populated mission, until it came under Vietnamese direction in 1935. Many French officials resented the widespread Spanish missionary opposition to the French conquest. Spanish missions were also likely the largest non-French foreign landholders in colonial Vietnam—in Nam Dinh province alone Spanish missions owned more than eleven hundred mau of land—and the ambiguous legal status of Spanish properties made many officials uneasy.” Spanish missionaries were well aware that national difference was a source of distrust, and many tried to blur the gap between themselves and the French. In 1914, the bishop of Bui Chu waged a personal campaign to receive the Legion of Honor, which elicited mixed responses from French officials.” The bishop was not simply being vain, for good relations with French officials helped stem fallout from the regular incidents that often arose in Spanish missions. Some Spanish missionaries continued to denounce the French conquest in the Spanish-language press in Europe and the Philippines well into the twentieth century.” In the 1890s and 1900s, the French also worried about ties between Catholics in Dominican missions and Hoang Hoa Tham, also known as Dé Tham, a powerful anti-French leader in northeastern Tonkin until his death in 1913. Tham was known to help the poor, and apparently he was very popular among Catholics around Bac Ninh for helping pay for new churches and buying water buffalos for poor families.” The Spanish bishop of Bac Ninh had long-standing ties to Dé Tham and served as an intermediary between him and the French for about a decade. Dé Tham was the de facto political authority in parts of northeastern Tonkin for almost twenty years after the end of the Sino-French War, and for Spanish missionaries in that region to have taken an ardent stand against him would have been difficult. That reality aside, some French officials did not see it that way.” A medly of more minor spats clouded Franco-Spanish relations throughout the colonial era. For example, in 1897 a Vietnamese priest near Nam Dinh refused to perform a burial mass for a French solider, which colonial officials blamed on Spanish influence.*’ During World War I, a French official in Phuc Yén province complained that Spanish missionaries subverted efforts to raise Vietnamese

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volunteers by urging villagers to hide healthy, of-age males and to present old and infirm candidates who would be rejected.” In 1923, a French official in Nam Dinh complained that Spanish missionaries ignored the Féte Jeanne D'Arc and its masses to war dead, military parades, and political ceremonies.” And a year later, in a village near Nam Dinh on Easter Sunday, a huge crowd of Catholics rushed out of mass as French officials drove by, threw rocks at their car, climbed all over it, smashed the windshield, and yelled anti-French epithets. This was the latest in a series of similar acts dating back years in which Catholics had thrown rocks at tax collectors and members of the garde indigéne and otherwise ignored or mocked

French authority. French officials blamed Father Casado, a Spanish missionary in the region. For these officials, Casado typified a newer generation of Spanish missionaries who had not lived through Nguyén-era communitarian violence and were ungrateful for the stability of France rule. That it did not occur to them to question whether one missionary could have orchestrated years of resistance demonstrates the degree to which they saw Spanish missionaries as subversive.” Franco-Spanish relations were particularly bad in Hai Phong, Tonkin’s secondlargest city, which was under Spanish ecclesiastical authority. Some colonial officials and French Catholics had long envisioned replacing Spanish missionaries

in Hai Phong with French ones, and the issue heated up after the death of the Spanish bishop of Hai Phong in 1929. At that point, a group called the Committee of French Catholics of Haiphong campaigned Rome to name a French bishop to correct the “subordinate, inferior, precarious, and intolerable” situation of French Catholics in the city. The apostolic delegate’s response left no doubt as to Rome's feelings on the matter: “I recommend instantly to French Catholics charity, acceptance, and above all silence in the press.” Just after the new bishop (Spanish again) was ordained, he gave a sermon recalling martyred Spanish missionaries, “unprotected by the French flag,’ that the governor-general saw as “a response to the wish of some of the French faithful to obtain a French bishop for the parish of Haiphong.” The committee’s appeals were to no avail: Church authority in the city remained Spanish until a transfer to Vietnamese authority in 1953. At times, colonial officials worried that the MEP itself might facilitate foreign influence. During World War I, fear of German infiltration into Vietnam was high after German agents helped finance attacks by Phan Boi Chau’s Vietnam Restoration League on French military posts in Tonkin.” This made French officials concerned about Basile Lanter, an MEP missionary from Alsace-Lorraine. Lanter's parents were born French citizens, but Germany's defeat of France in 1871 made Lanter, born in 1885, a German national. Lanter drew official scrutiny in 1915 when

he resisted leaving his post for an assignment in a colonial hospital. French officials found his attitude “unfortunate and even suspect” and held him even after a review of his activities turned up “no letters with foreign stamps” or anything else suspicious.’ In October 1915, the governor-general sent Lanter to Cu Lao Giéng

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in the Mekong Delta, where he and two other missionaries spent most of the war under military supervision. Lanter was not released until July 1918. In January 1919, Lanter wrote French officials “to state that no one has ever been able to reproach me for an utterance, a written word, a gesture contrary to my attachment and devotion to France.” He asked only for reimbursement of his lost stipend and expenses, the large sum of 660 piasters.”. Despite having been cleared, the hapless Lanter was still forced to foot the bill for his nearly three-year internment. Colonial officials worried even more about the character and motivations of the rank-and-file Vietnamese clergy, most of whom seemed quite far from idealized paragons of devotion like Truong Vinh Ky. By the 1890s, many French officials viewed the Vietnamese clergy through the double lenses of race and republicanism: not only were they Vietnamese, and thus potentially resentful of colonial influence (as well as, in their mind, naturally irrational, dissimulative, and lazy), but they also privileged Catholics to the detriment of social order. As one French official wrote, “The Catholic population .. . feels itself to be independent and protected in every situation, even the most detestable, by their priests, and they only recognize their authority.” Distrust of the local clergy, and not Catholic favoritism, was the main reason French officials tried to avoid measures that might upset Catholics. For example, during the debate whether to apply the 1901 and 1904 Association Laws and the 1905 Law of Separation of Church and State to Vietnam, many officials shared the sentiment of the French resident in Ha Dong that “the discontent that the 1905 law would provoke among Catholics ... would inevitably be exploited by interested parties and foreigners. ... Sentiments of defiance, hatred, and revolt are quickly aroused in an impressionable population whose credulous souls are easily accessible.”” The rise of anticlericalism in colonial politics angered many missionaries, who

saw criticisms of Catholic missions as morally debase and unpatriotic. Even in the 1880s, French Catholic newspapers used mass Catholic deaths in Vietnam as fodder for their criticisms of the newly elected republican government by claiming that “the deaths of the ‘true Christians’ of Vietnam laid bare the Jewish and Masonic roots of the republic.” This kind of sentiment grew in Catholic life in Vietnam around the turn of the century, the most intense moment in the metropolitan Church-state wars, when it seemed like the calls from Freemasons to expel Catholic missions might carry the day. Critics of missions, it must be noted, also reserved healthy amounts of invective for colonial officials who they felt too often caved in to mission influence. But despite sincere efforts by many colonial officials to maintain working relationships with missionaries, many Catholics still saw the expansion of republican colonialism as inherently anticlerical. And in the first decade of the twentieth century, which saw a reduction in official support for Catholic institutions, the highly publicized removal of a few missionaries and nuns from colonial hospitals and schools, and the arrival in Vietnam of secular

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educational associations like the Alliance Francaise and the Mission Laique, doom seemed imminent.” Anticlericalism aside, many missionaries were also shocked by what colonial rule meant in practice. Missionaries regularly criticized the French monopolies on alcohol, salt, and opium that were among the most profitable—and, for Vietnamese, the most onerous—of the state's many enterprises. As one missionary wrote in 1905, - The time has passed when, living from a primitive industry, a job that did

not earn much, the Annamite did not know real misery. ... The French occupation has put an end to this idyll... . One cannot live today on the nothing that was enough to live on in the past; everywhere people now claim to have nothing left with which to live.”’”* In 1901, a Spanish missionary defended a local priest accused of instigating resistance to the salt monopoly, arguing that the price that the state paid to salt producers was too low.” During the Christmas season in 1906, LAvenir du Tonkin printed a cartoon titled “Our gifts for the year” that pictured Vietnamese porters struggling under the weight of boxes labeled “customs,” “monopolies,”

“taxes,” “lies? and “expediencies, all weighed down by a Masonic pentagram. ” The colonial state's expanding fiscal infrastructure also hit home in more direct ways; in 1908, the governor-general made applicable a metropolitan law that levied a 4 percent tax on the revenues of all religious congregations, which took a chunk out of mission agricultural revenues.” Missionaries also criticized colonial prisons, where they often ministered. In an account of a visit to the notorious island prison of Poulo Condore, one missionary noted with shock that seventy or eighty inmates shared one room, and that many were forced to sleep on the floor.” JeanBaptiste Dronet, a missionary in Hanoi, visited Catholics in city prisons for nearly fifty years. In 1911, Dronet wrote of terrible conditions in Hanoi prisons, and he ex-

pressed hope that the French might ensure more humane treatment." Many years and many wrenching visits later, Dronet wearily admitted that things were not any better. “Never in my life,’ he wrote, “have I seen as many executions as I have this year.” In the aftermath of the rural revolts in 1931, another missionary begged for the release of seven supposedly innocent people—none of them Catholic—to no avail.” Missionaries also blamed the colonial state for not doing more to fight poverty. Most missionaries routinely expressed acute desperation at their lack of resources, especially during the many failed harvests, famines, cholera epidemics, floods, and typhoons that plagued rural areas. Tales of privation were standard fare in missionary journals, and it is important to take them with a grain of salt. But missionaries were more likely than other Europeans to witness devastating rural poverty, and many were horrified. Missionaries reported seeing people starved to death or drowned in floods lying on the side of the road, and they heard stories of survivors forced to sell their children for lack of food. Poverty also forced many Catholics to leave their parishes—often permanently—in search of work. As the bishop of Vinh

76 CHAPTER 2 wrote in 1916, “cholera and famine have taken thousands of Christians this year. I am hearing of parishes that have lost more than 10 percent of their population. And were not near the end!”””* The missionary Victor Aubert wrote in 1938 that his parish in Ha Dong was a living graveyard of “ambulatory corpses and walking skeletons ... most of whom havent eaten in two or three days,’ and he blamed the fact that “social assistance in this country is still deeply flawed.” The place of Catholic missions in Vietnam was never as hotly debated as it was in the roughly fifteen years before the First World War. Thereafter, the shrinking missionary presence and their weakening financial clout not only gave the colonial state an unquestioned primacy in the lives of most Vietnamese, but it also led to a wave of Vatican reforms to nationalize the Vietnamese Church that gave wary missionaries and colonial officials a common ground that had not existed since the era of naval rule in Cochinchina. That said, mission and state never returned to the close ties of the conquest era. Even during the First World War, a time of broad unity on religious issues in France, a range of things complicated mission-state relations. Like Basil Lanter had done, many missionaries argued that they could best serve France by staying in Vietnam and pursuing their vocation. The war years were very difficult in Tonkin; terrible floods in 1915 led to failed harvests and epidemics, and missionaries criticized state refusal for aid simply because France was at war. Missionaries also worried that the thousands of Vietnamese Catholics who had gone to France to fight and work would become victims of the secular threats of metropolitan society. For their part, most colonial officials found requests for deferments, attempts to protect Catholics from service, and criticisms of the state at a time of war to be unpatriotic and even seditious.” Even as metropolitan Church-state conflicts of the fin de siecle receded into memory, the colonial context remained a fertile breeding ground for disagreement. In the interwar years, new religious movements were a particularly sensitive issue. Most notable was Protestantism, which by the 1920s had trickled into Vietnam via the American Christian and Missionary Alliance (CMA). Catholic missionaries feared losing converts at a time when conversions had become scarce, and they responded to Protestantism’ arrival with an alarmism that greatly overstated its modest gains. French officials, for their part, worried that American influence in a French colony might follow Protestant missionaries, whose oftenstrong criticisms of French colonial rule did little to assuage official anxiety. For much of the 1920s, the Sareté closely followed the meetings, publications, and movements of American missionaries. Shared concerns, however, did not prevent Protestantism from becoming a wedge issue between missions and French officials. The protectorate treaties gave Catholics the sole right to proselytize outside Cochinchina and French concessions in Annam and Tonkin, but Protestant missionaries essentially ignored this,

spread into rural areas in Annam and Tonkin, and presented French officials

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with a fait accompli. Spirited critiques in the pages of the MEP-owned LAvenir du Tonkin and lobbying by prominent Catholics were no match for the American diplomats and influential French Protestants who defended Protestant missions. The most important—and, for Catholics, the most galling—defense of Protestants came from leftist associations such as the League of the Rights of Man, which argued in forums from local newspapers to the Chamber of Deputies in France that any attempt to restrict Protestants (and later Cao Dai, another Catholic concern) reeked of a retrograde, royalist pro-Catholicism. And in a place where Catholics were a small and polarizing minority, France, in the words of one colonial official, “could not defend and consecrate an argument... that made Catholicism a state religion in a French protectorate.’ For many Catholics, the colonial administrations decision not to ban Protestantism and Cao Dai—if it was a decision at all— reinforced a familiar and unwelcome link between state authority and threatening religious activity.” Education, the locus classicus of Church-state wars in France, was perhaps the most important site of mission-state conflicts in the interwar era. Although a lack of colonial schools largely protected Catholic schools during the high point of political anticlericalism, they had not emerged unscathed. In 1901, the Colonial Council ended a subsidy to the Saigon mission because the bishop had publicly questioned whether it made sense to teach Vietnamese to speak French, and the outcry at the bishop's remarks forced him to defend the role of mission schools in the colony.” Conflicts such as these grew after the creation of the Department of Public Education in 1917. As they did in France, missionaries opposed schools that did not make Catholicism part of the curriculum—laicité, far from being neutral, seemed an engine of godlessness. Many Vietnamese Catholics opposed such schools too: in 1929 one wrote in Sacerdos Indosinensis that when French teachers spoke about Jesus they criticized him, and that Rousseau, Voltaire, Hugo, and Zola dominated the classroom. The author even went so far as to blame a rise in juvenile crime and suicide on colonial schools.” But not all Vietnamese Catholics opposed new colonial schools: one, writing in the Catholic newspaper Trung Hoa Nhat Bao in 1925, praised colonial officials for their investments in education.” One missionary who complained to the supervisor of Trung Hoa Nhat Bao was sure that colonial officials had forced the article into the paper,” but it was not unusual to see this view from some Vietnamese Catholics in the 1920s. Other concerns amplified the perceived ideological and spiritual threat of new colonial schools. Facilities were a perennial problem for Catholic schools, which were often destroyed by a storm or flood, and charity was rarely enough to fix them:

one colonial inspector described Catholic schools in Phat Diém as “installed in a lamentable manner,’ with “children exposed to the elements.” Lack of funds led some Catholic schools to charge a fee to help cover the cost of materials, facilities, and the teacher’s salary, a fee that many families could not afford. The high prestige

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of other forms of private education was also a challenge to Catholic schools.'” As if such challenges were not enough, the rise of a colonial educational system subjected Catholic schools to more inspections, and instructors had to send regular reports to the state, keep student registers, and request permission to open new schools. Hostile local officials began to use these new regulations as ammunition in their spats with missionaries. After the MEP reached an arrangement with a Swiss Catholic order to head the first Catholic secondary school in Vietnam, the director of public education objected to foreigners—even the Swiss—teaching in schools that would offer the baccalauréat, arguing that they were unqualified, but his main objection seems to have been a Catholic school offering the baccalauréat at all." For Catholic educators, however, the most serious new regulation was that all private school teachers needed a brevet détudes to teach, which most did not have. Missions responded quickly. In 1924, the Brothers of Christian Schools founded the Ecole Saint Thomas Aquin in Nam Dinh, which was meant to help Catholic primary school teachers obtain the brevet détudes. But it was difficult to bring most of the priests, catechists, and nuns who taught in primary schools to this level. As a result, many Catholic schools continued to operate without certified teachers. In 1931, the director of public education, a man involved in nearly constant bickering with mission officials, compared publications for the Colonial Exposition in Vincennes to provincial records and discovered that missions had declared less than half of the Catholic schools that they claimed actually existed. He also noticed that many seminarians took the exam for the brevet détudes even though seminaries were not authorized to train teachers.'’ When colonial officials such as this one accused missions of noncompliance, missionaries demanded exemption on the grounds that their schools were socially useful. Such spats could stretch out over years.

One case in particular illustrates the durability of conflicts over schools and how this came act as a site for broader tensions between missions and colonial officials. Paul-Marie Ramond, bishop of Hung Hoa from 1895 until 1938, had a poor relationship with most of the officials with whom he crossed paths in his long career. Six years into his tenure, officials began to complain that local Catholics used the bishop’s influence to subvert local justice; during World War I, Ramond reportedly pressured non-Catholics to recruit more men as a way to protect Cath-

olics from military service.” Ramond protested all such charges, insisting that they rested on anti-Catholic views. After the implementation of regulations on private schools in the mid-1920s, French provincial officials decided not to remove catechists from teaching posts in local Catholic schools; Ramond still insisted that

they simply be granted brevet détudes outright. The officials did not appreciate Ramondss rejection of their olive branch and dismissed his request, which he continued to resubmit well into the 1930s.” Also, as Ramond proudly reported to his

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superior, he simply stopped declaring new schools.’ In all of the many confrontations that flared up over schools, Ramond blamed the petty attitude of colonial officials as a sign of all that had gone wrong with French colonization in Vietnam, even blaming Vietnam’ anticolonial movements on French restrictions on Catholic education.” French officials, in turn, saw the bishop's appeals as typical of missionary zeal and obstructionism.” As far in space and time as this was from the Church-state wars in France, it still had much the same ring.

THE LIMITS AND EXCESSES OF MISSIONARY CATHOLICISM In February 1906, the bishop of Hanoi wrote a worried letter to Rome about the mood in his mission. “Despite the inherent flaws in human nature,’ he wrote, even more common in the relations between men of different nationalities and temperaments, spiritual union until very recently had always existed among us. But with the establishment of the French protectorate in Tonkin, we have entered into a sort of crisis of transition, in which the infiltration of modern ideas on one hand, and the examples of a certain number of Europeans on the other, have had a regrettable influence on the spirit of our indigenous priests and catechists. The attitude toward missionaries has neither the deference nor the cordiality of the past. ... Before, the presence of the district head was received with pleasure, and was even desired by the natives. But now, with the new ideas just mentioned, a few of them are brought to view the missionary as an unwelcome observer, or even an intruder. ~

The bishop was correct that French rule led some Vietnamese Catholics to resent

the presence of French missionaries, and he was also correct that the ruptures of French rule led many Vietnamese—Catholics and other—to question longstanding social norms and forms of authority. However, the bishop failed to realize, or to acknowledge, that many of the problems in missions were also internal. The institutional expansion of missions in Vietnam that had begun in the 1830s accelerated rapidly after the French conquest, which reduced Vietnamese Catholic autonomy in important ways. Moreover, although the flood of missionaries streaming into Vietnam often disagreed with French officials about the role of missions in colonization, many did share basic assumptions about European superiority characteristic of the era. These rapid changes in mission organization and culture over two generations produced a real crisis in Catholic life in Vietnam around the turn of the century. The explosion in the number of missionaries was the most basic problem. In 1868, there were only sixty-four MEP missionaries in Vietnam.’ By 1892, there were 218.” By 1904, there were 387.'° The number of Spanish missionaries also grew with French rule, but not nearly as much: there were roughly twenty in 1862,

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thirty-four in 1896, and sixty-seven in 1922.'” In short, in about forty years, the MEP presence in Vietnam roughly sextupled, and its administrative and institutional arms expanded accordingly. Even within the MEP, this produced powerful tensions. Many senior missionaries at the turn of the century had been in Vietnam since the 1870s, they vividly recalled the hardships of the Nguyén era, and they saw their new colleagues as presumptuous and ignorant. In 1907, MEP bishops wrote a collective letter complaining that new missionaries did not respect mission culture: “what pain to see young colleagues just off of the boat... judging, criticizing men and things based on their impressions of the moment! What even greater pain if just afterward, for frivolous reasons, we see them demand a transfer or refuse their assigned post, threatening to leave the mission or return to France if we do not bend ourselves to their wishes.” The bishops bemoaned that many new missionaries treated the MEP as “a republic of sorts, in which the last one to arrive regards oneself as the equal of the most senior,’ and they worried that this would make a terrible impression in Vietnam, where hierarchy based on age was a fundamental part of social relations. * A more serious problem was that many of the new missionaries could not fulfill the considerable demands of their vocation. Many held important supervisory positions in a rapidly expanding mission bureaucracy, and many could not handle the demands of the job. Language was a major problem. Because virtually none of the local clergy spoke French, new missionaries needed to achieve an appreciable fluency in Vietnamese during a yearlong apprenticeship. This was rarely enough to prepare them to run a district, seminary, or hospital. In 1920, the bishop of Saigon noted that many missionaries left because they could not learn Vietnamese.” Those who stayed, as another bishop noted, “barely reach the level of indigenous priests, despite the fact that they are supposed to be capable of directing and instructing them.” This meant that “their relations with the indigenous clergy have become difficult, and their influence on the clergy basically nil?” The new generation of missionaries came from a wealthier, more modernized France than their predecessors, and some expected lifestyles that taxed mission budgets and hurt its image. Missionaries in the colonial era requested return trips to France more often than did their predecessors, trips that new steamship routes between France and Vietnam facilitated.’ Some were not willing to accept posts in remote areas where they would have little contact with Europeans: one regularly fraternized with French officials, to his bishop’s displeasure.*” Some took what their bishops saw as too many trips that lasted too long to mission sanatoriums. One demanded wooden floors in his house and spent months arguing with his bishop about it.** In 1908, a missionary named Patuel built himself a huge house with mission funds without permission. When his bishop refused to reimburse him for all of the expenses, Patuel led a fund-raising campaign among local Catholics to make up the balance and refused to tell his bishop how much money

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he raised. Relations disintegrated so far that Patuel reportedly became the inside source for an article in an anticlerical newspaper. Once the house was built, however, the MEP put its involuntary investment to work, publishing a photo of it in Missions Catholiques.”™*

The early colonial era seemed an economic wild west for enterprising Frenchmen, and some missionaries devoted large parts of their time and zeal to something other than saving souls. One missionary, to ameliorate his family’s financial troubles, loaned MEP funds with interest to a colon trying to start a business.” Another bought land in Yén Bai with personal funds, against MEP regulations, and set up a private enterprise harvesting rice and timber using local Catholics as labor. Even if he did compensate local Catholics fairly, they likely thought that the profits, as they did in other missions, went back into the community and not, to use his bishop’s words, into the missionary’s “bank account or suitcase.” For fifteen years, one MEP missionary not only sold rice and timber, but he also raised pigs to sell as cured hams (hundreds annually!) and he acted as a middleman between heads of enterprises and local labor.’”’ In 1932, Vietnamese priests accused the bishop of Saigon of forcibly relocating Catholic families in order to build apartments to rent for the mission's benefit.’ Some missionaries were less creative, simply embezzling funds or stealing money from the MEP or their colleagues.” Many missionaries did not deal well with daily life in Vietnam or with their vows. Some leaned on alcohol or opium to cope with the solitude.” Some fought mental illness: one became obsessed with building a perpetual motion machine and stayed up day and night working on it until his bishop sent him back to France for psychiatric care. Some broke their vow of chastity, nearly always with Vietnamese women in their parish. In the case of Legrand de la Liraye (author of Notes historique sur la nation Annamite and a vocal supporter of the pretender Lé Duy Phung in the 1860s), his bishop blamed “too assiduously frequenting Europeans, and having a sort of predilection for Europeans with suspect morals.” It is clear

that newfound authority allowed some missionaries to act on temptation: one MEP missionary allegedly seduced the wives of people who worked for him and threatened to kill one of their husbands. After he was forced to leave the MEP, the missionary fulfilled his bishop's dim view of colonial officials by going to work as a customs officer.’ As visible and embarrassing as poor missionary behavior was, it was not the root cause of the problem. To begin with, unprecedented strength in numbers and new freedom of movement invigorated the missionary effort to ensure conformity and orthodoxy in Catholic life. In 1900 and 1912, synods in Ké Sat and Ké S6é near Hanoi affirmed strict guidelines for implementation of the sacraments and the regulation of daily lives of lay Catholics based on the resolutions of the 1803 synod in “Sutchen” (Szechwan) in south China. These ranged from new strictures on the conditions for taking communion, giving confession, and receiving absolution;

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stricter forms of penance; restrictions on diet, work, speech, and other social and familial behavior; prohibitions on the use of local symbols or objects in ritual contexts; and calls to eradicate “superstitious” practices.” Although the Cochinchina mission had implemented these in the 1841 synod in Go Thi, the larger Tonkin missions had not, because at the time their bishops “viewed the Sutchen Synod's recommendations as dated and obsolete.’ But two generations later, missionaries fanned out into Tonkin with marching orders of reform and orthodoxy that challenged, more directly than ever before, how the majority of Vietnam's Catholics lived their faith. Missionaries in this era attempted to “correct” a wide range of daily activities. In the realm of marriage, missionaries reported campaigns against cohabitation before marriage, the marriage of girls below a certain age, polygamy, divorce (most often in the case of infertility), mixed marriages, marriages within families, “secret’ marriages not officiated by a priest, and remarriage before a certain period of mourning.'° In burial ceremonies, they tried to prevent “excessive” spending on feasts or offerings, elegies to the dead, the use of a geomancer to determine a fortuitous burial spot, and the participation of Catholics in non-Catholic burials (and vice versa)."’ Missionaries forbade Catholics in mixed villages from participating in feasts honoring ancestors or tutelary spirits and from attending dramatic performances celebrating “the pagan cult” or other village festivals. Although many missionaries tried hard to incorporate local practices into Catholic ritual and daily life in ways they deemed acceptable, this was often not enough to prevent disruptions in Catholic community life and communitarian relations.” Missionaries also fought to limit gambling and opium use. This expanded oversight was particularly significant in the Catholic heartland of coastal Tonkin, where hundreds of thousands of Catholics lived in a relatively small and safe area well suited to permanent missionary posts and frequent district tours. The expanded missionary presence was also disruptive in more material ways. As noted, missionary intervention in administration and justice often adversely affected relations with local officials, and missionary behavior toward non-Catholics often worsened relations with nearby villages or within mixed villages. Rapidly shifting administrative boundaries in missions at times combined Catholic congregations that had poor relations with each other.” Simply receiving a missionary during a district tour was a weighty material commitment, as it involved feeding and lodging him and often hosting a feast. Districts that missionaries headed were now much smaller, which gave them much more influence over who became a catechist or a priest, membership of village councils, and how income from common village lands was used. Missionaries also controlled most of the revenues from expanded European contributions and huge swaths of new mission lands, and what they prioritized, often with good intentions, was often not what circumstances called for. During a visit to Bui Chu in 1923, an apostolic envoy noted that

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“the churches are too beautiful... the presbyteries of the Dominican fathers are often sumptuous and often have an worldly character that is unsuitable for men of the cloth. ... The abuse is more regrettable because these houses and churches are built at the expense of Christians, most of whom only eat once a day... . The French in Hanoi say that the missionaries cut the Annamites in four to make beautiful churches.”” One particularly disliked missionary practice was forcing converts to sign bond

arrangements under which they agreed to pay an indemnity if they left the religion. These began in MEP missions no earlier than the 1840s, and at least by the 1890s, Spanish Dominicans did the same.” As missionaries grew in numbers and authority, such arrangements became more common and more easily enforced. Missionaries first adopted the practice in hopes of protecting resources from “false

converts’ seeking only material aid, and many did not recognize the degree to which it was coercive. In 1909, one MEP missionary even filed a number of these contracts with a French official when their signatories left the mission with the hope that colonial officials would help enforce them. These contracts called for signatories to pay three cents for each day that they had “been Catholic” to compensate the MEP for the cost of their education and ministry. The officials refused to enforce the contracts, feeling that they presented “a sort of barrier to freedom of conscience, for an indemnity of three cents per day gives, after one year, a fine of $10.95, and a native who after four years of catechism wants to abandon the Catholic faith would hesitate in fear of having to pay forty-some piasters, a considerable sum.” Vietnamese clearly resented the practice: in 1899, a French official

noted that a group of people who wished to leave their mission asked him for a written authorization that they could present to supersede the mission contract, which the French official refused to do in order to maintain good relations with missionaries.» Because most colonial officials avoided intervening in situations such as these, it is likely that some people simply paid or “remained Catholic” out of an inability to do so. Perhaps the most significant effect of the arrival of so many new missionaries was the reduced role of the local clergy. Not all the local clergy were saints, and

sometimes problems arose when missionaries tried to prevent them from doing things such as buying cheap rice and reselling it at a profit, lending money at exorbitant rates, or using the offerings of the laity to dubious ends.’ More often, however, the arrival of a missionary meant that the local clergy, who were used to a greater degree of autonomy, were thrust into the role of auxiliaries with less influence over ritual practice, spiritual life, and communal resources than they had enjoyed before. Missionaries, often with the best intentions, often reassigned adept local priests to another parish in need of experienced clerical authority, but many did not want to leave their parishes of origin. Some of these departing priests took

cherished votive objects with them, which only further upset local Catholics.”

84 CHAPTER 2 Missionaries replaced priests and catechists as principal instructors in the House of God and in seminary. They exercised more oversight over how priests used funds from mass intentions sent from France and Rome. More missionaries meant that

priests now rarely had the final word in conflicts that remained within Catholic judicial structures. The rise of French as a bureaucratic language also increasingly made missionaries de facto Catholic representatives in conflicts with authorities, a role they played much less often before the colonial era.

New missionary self-perceptions and attitudes made their growing presence even more divisive. Although building independent Churches outside Europe had long been the stated goal of the missionary vocation, in the nineteenth century many missionary organizations strove above all else to augment their own presence. Often this was because, in an era of broad colonial expansion grounded in ideas of biological racism, missionaries viewed local clergy in a much more inferior light than they had in the past. “The indigenous clergy,’ wrote the bishop of Saigon in 1906, “is obedient, respectful, easy to direct; he diligently fills the functions of his ministry and preaches and catechizes carefully ... but alas! They are not yet stripped of the defaults of their race. They are vain, not always honest, and if a few are devoted to saving souls, it is not the majority. Finally, of their own admission, they are and will remain for a long time incapable of self-direction. The day that the mission passes under their administration will be the end of our religion in the mission.”””* “None among them,” wrote the bishop of Qui Nhon, “has enough breadth of vision, prestige, humility, abnegation, energy, or spirit to main-

tain subordination, concord, integrity of faith, discipline, and morality in their ranks or their congregations.” Nola Cooke notes how in the mid-nineteenth century, MEP journals began to represent missionaries through “manly self-portraits of pious fortitude and European superiority that inflated missionary virtues and projected all weakness onto a piteous or contemptible Vietnamese Other.” This meant, in Jacob Ramsay's words, that “the creation of a self-sufficient clergy, led by indigenous bishops acting independently of Paris, was just as unlikely in the racially conscious nineteenth-century Catholic church as was the possibility of local priests wholly adopting the MEP worldview.”

A new sense of racial difference and hierarchy meant an increasingly stratified culture in mission life. In 1853 and 1858, responding to campaigns from the MEP leadership, Propaganda Fide issued two directives affirming the missionary right of precedence (droit de préséance) in MEP missions.’ In theory, the right of precedence was to be observed in two formal contexts, in official administrative reunions and in communal dining. But, during the colonial era, many missionaries also stopped living communally with the local clergy in the presbytery or the House of God in favor of living in private houses. Annual retreats for missionaries and local clergy were now often held separately, and the latter had very little formal input in directing increasingly bureaucratized missions. Priests and catechists who traveled with missionaries on pastoral visits often doubled as domestics, cooking,

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doing laundry, polishing boots, and even washing the feet of their missionary supervisors. In many missions, even the oldest and most respected Vietnamese priests were expected to stand whenever a missionary entered the room.” Perhaps the most fundamental marker of a new mission culture was language. Although the origins of the convention are hard to date precisely, an apostolic envoy to Vietnam in 1922 noted that in “the era of the persecutions,’ missionaries, regardless of age, began increasingly to be addressed with the kinship term co (great-grandfather or advisor), while the local clergy were referred to as cha (father) or, in the case of the oldest and most respected, cu (also great-grandfather,

but a term signifying a slightly lower status). In turn, the local clergy referred to themselves as con (child) regardless of their age when speaking with a missionary. By the end of the nineteenth century, changing missionary demographics made this change even more jarring. At the height of the missionary revival, missionary organizations successfully portrayed the vocation as a heroic and glorious undertaking in a way that appealed to many French youth. According to MEP statistics, the average age of the 325 MEP missionaries in Vietnam in 1900 was only thirty-eight.’ Because bishops and senior missionaries held high-level positions or were often restricted to cities for health reasons, the missionaries who had the most contact with the Catholic population were virtually always younger than the priests they supervised, who in most missions were rarely younger than their midforties."* Notables and village elders were often older. Changing missionary self-perceptions led many to adopt certain forms of paternalist discipline that, in their minds, were necessary to help Catholic communities function. When, in 1920, the bishop of Saigon wrote to a new missionary about to assume his first post, he explained that “the best way to be accepted by your subordinates” is “to be good, while also having a firmness that shows them that goodness and weakness are two completely different things.” In practice, “firmness” meant things such as corporal punishment, which missionaries regularly employed. In 1900, during a visit to a Catholic village in Ninh Binh, a French official found what he described as “torture instruments,’ including mallets and rattan poles, on a rack in the presbytery. When he wrote to the mission about this, the bishop denied that missionaries used such things excessively, but he acknowledged that corporal punishment was a standard way of enforcing discipline.’ Another French official confirmed both the practice and the missionary sentiment behind it. “Relations between missionaries and Catholics are those of ‘a father with his children,” wrote the official; he noted that a missionary was surprised when a Vietnamese complained about the practice, since in the missionary’s mind “this method of punishment is employed by parents, masters, and superiors upon children, disciples, and subjects?” Corporal punishment was certainly not unique to missionaries; the local clergy made use of it as well, and it was also common in non-Catholic life. However, some missionaries went beyond the boundaries of acceptability. One named Maillard

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reportedly inflicted five hundred blows with a rattan pole on a catechist in one session, far beyond common practice or what Vietnamese law allowed. When rebuked by his bishop, Maillard responded that as a district chief and a European it was his right to treat a Vietnamese subordinate however he saw fit, and he threatened to leave his district for a monastery if he was punished.” This kind of abusive behavior had consequences. In 1908, an MEP missionary wrote to French officials accusing a seminarian of stealing two hundred piasters for the reconstruction of

churches in his district and running away. A month later, he wrote again to say that the real culprit had been found and that the seminarian had returned. He had run away, the missionary noted, because he was afraid of being caned.’ And for those priests for whom corporal punishment did not work, missionaries had other solutions. In 1901, the bishop of Saigon noted, “it is to remedy the weaknesses of certain of our priests that... 1 have deemed it necessary to build an asylum of correction /asile de correction] ad tempus for a few and a residence in perpetuum for two or three most certainly.” Numerous cases of open conflict between missionaries and local priests testify to how far their relations had degenerated by the early twentieth century. The best-documented case is the Vinh mission, where fallout from the arrest of the Dong Du priests further poisoned an already terrible atmosphere; in December 1909, 262 priests and catechists wrote a letter to Rome in support of the besieged bishop Pineau, whose removal missionaries had demanded for years, as a form of protest against their missionary supervisors.” The bishop of Hanoi noted regretfully that because Tonkin’s missions were closely tied, they “will inevitably feel the aftershocks of the misfortunes that menace this mission.” “Did you know, bemoaned the bishop of Phat Diém in 1909, “that there is currently in Indochina a mission led by our society in which the indigenous clergy is trying its best to get rid of French missionaries? Did you know that in this vicariate ... priests are considering leaving the ministry and returning to their families rather than put up with the treatments they receive at the hands of missionaries?”’”’ One bishop, when investigating claims that a missionary near Qui Nhon had sexual relations with several young girls, uncovered a plot by a local priest, “inspired by hatred and vengeance, to enjoin the girls to make up the accusations to force the missionary out of the parish." Resignations, protests, and slander were far from the worst of it. One defrocked local priest reportedly tried to poison the bishops of Nam Dinh and Hai Phong in the 1920s.” And in 1922, a local priest reportedly killed a missionary who had tied him up and whipped him.” “Today things have changed,” bemoaned the bishop of Vinh in 1903. “It is rare that we see, as in the past, entire villages asking to embrace our holy faith. In many places, missionaries are only able to glean a few converts; in other places, their role is only to preserve what has already been achieved.’”’ The many missionaries who experienced stagnating conversions or even “apostasies” in their districts around

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the turn of the century blamed ongoing hostility from the local population and the rise of secular colonial rule for the problems in Catholic life. But some Vietnamese Catholics told a different story: “Under the pretext that they are religious, the missionaries repress us. They demand our complete submission. They are placed in charge of the richest parishes. Two or three priests are necessary to carry out their orders... even though they do not adequately speak Annamite and do not yet know customs well enough to attend to affairs. They are all chiefs and all powers are centralized in them.””* Thus reads one of the dozens of letters that Vietnamese Catholic priests and notables wrote in the early 1920s about the sweeping changes of the previous generation, when the growing size, presence, and power of missions and changing attitudes of European religious authorities transformed Catholic life in Vietnam. However, what it perhaps most telling about the letter is its recipient—Henri Lécroart, sent by the Vatican to Indochina in 1922 as one of many official apostolic envoys sent around the world to take stock of what Church authorities saw as worrisome conditions in Catholic missions worldwide. During the 1920s, Romes efforts to address these conditions began a transition to independent national Churches that echoed broader political and cultural debates of the late colonial era. The idea of a Church free from missionary influence, as exciting for Vietnamese Catholics as it was unthinkable for missionaries, raised deeper questions about race relations, European rule, and the specter of independence that would shape Catholic life in Vietnam over the following generation.

3

The Birth of a National Church

In the tiny village of Saint-Loup-sur-Thouet in the Deux-Sévres in France, there stands an unusual church honoring the village’s most celebrated son. Théophane Vénard left for Vietnam in 1852, and he died in Tonkin in 1861 during a wave of communitarian violence following the French invasion of Cochinchina. The church in Saint-Loup, built in his honor, was meant to be a glorious cathedral, and its sanctuary and apse indeed tower over the rolling fields of Poitou. But the sanctuary and altar are all there is. In the years after construction began in the 1880s, wars and hard times made it hard to raise money, especially at a time when the Church had begun to mean a little less to the people of Saint-Loup than it once had. The people of Saint-Loup, forced to stop building, closed off the church with immense windows. A statue of Vénard stands outside the unfinished structure, honoring the missionary’s unfinished life and ministry.

The story of the church in Saint-Loup-sur-Thouet is much like that of the Church that Théophane Vénard hoped to build on the other side of the world. Vénard left for Vietnam during a missionary revival that brought the European presence in Vietnamese Catholic life to its highest point. By the early twentieth century, there was about one missionary for every two Vietnamese priests, reflecting three generations during which the increase in the number of European missionaries outpaced the increase in local clergy and during which the responsibilities and power of each group grew increasingly different. But by the August Revolution in 1945 there were roughly six Vietnamese priests for each missionary, and in 1960, during the Second Vatican Council, Rome transformed all missions in Vietnam into formal dioceses, thus establishing the formal structure of a Vietnamese Catholic Church that would soon become totally independent from 88

THE BIRTH OF A NATIONAL CHURCH 89

missionary authority. The emergence of a national Church in Vietnam during the interwar years had roots in a generation of decline for missionary Catholicism that seemed hard to imagine at the turn of the century. During the two decades after the First World War, waning European religiosity and the growing tensions surrounding missionary authority in Catholic life outside of Europe led the Vatican

toward an ambitious program of reforms meant to turn over the leadership of Churches in European empires to the local clergy. In Vietnam, this came during a tumultuous time of cultural and political flux brought about by colonial rule, a changing social order, and the rise of new ideas and new values. For many in this generation of Vietnamese Catholics, their rise to power in their own Church became the principal foundation for their experience of and participation in the cultural and political transformations of the era.

THE DECLINE OF MISSIONARY CATHOLICISM AND THE QUESTION OF A NATIONAL CHURCH “Practically speaking, we do not love one another. . . . Profound differences in temperament explain this lack of affection but do not excuse it. On one side like on the other, we are not forgiving, and, at bottom, whatever might be said, there is a real precedence of race.”’ These were the frank words of one French bishop to Henri

Lécroart, an apostolic envoy sent to observe and report on the state of Catholic missions in Indochina. Lécroart spent nearly a year in Vietnam over 1922 and 1923, and some of what he saw there inspired him. “Nothing,” he wrote about his visit to Bui Chu, “can convey the idea of the love of these Christians, of their enthusiasm

and devotion for the holy pontiff. The receptions that I received in this vicariat were unforgettable. Crowds of ten thousand Christians acclaiming the pope, crying, beating their hands... this was the amazing spectacle that I witnessed.” But not all was well in Bui Chu. Lécroart reported that inadequate seminaries produced ineffective priests, that resources were limited and poorly allocated, and that mission authorities often had bad relations with French authorities. What most concerned Lécroat, however, was that missionaries “impose themselves from their arrival in an authoritarian manner that elicits distrust,’ and he noted separation and inequality in eating and living arrangements and in most daily interactions.” This was not the case in all missions: Lécroart noted that the relative prosperity of Cochinchina meant fewer problems with resources and budgets, and he saw that in some missions—most notably in Hué—the relations between missionaries and the local clergy were quite good. But to varying degrees in every mission he visited, Lécroart saw inequality and ill will that he felt posed a real threat. Lécroart spent at least as much time talking with the local clergy as he spent with missionaries, and Vietnamese priests took advantage of the apostolic envoy’s visit to express complaints that missionary superiors had long ignored. In Phat

90 CHAPTER 3 Diém, a Vietnamese professor of Latin in the minor seminary gave a public talk on the “miserable condition” of the local clergy, and students complained about the lack of food, their poor training, and the ill treatment they received at the hands of missionaries.” In Qui Nhon, Vietnamese priests complained about being forced to refer to missionaries as cd, regardless of their age, when even aged and venerated Vietnamese priests only received the lesser honorific cy." Lécroart heard similar complaints in every mission, and after he left, letters from Vietnamese priests poured in to Propaganda Fide by the dozens. In one, Vietnamese priests drew an explicit parallel between the situation in their missions and the political situation in their country. “Pagans,” the priests wrote,’ see “a spirit of oppression of some by others in religion like in politics. ... Seeing French missionaries oppress us in religion like other French do in politics, they then consider our religion as imperfect and human. They distrust it and turn their backs on it.” Lécroart’s observations—indeed, his very presence in Vietnam—reflected a real concern among many leaders at the Vatican about the state of the Catholic world

in the aftermath of the First World War. The place of the Church in the world changed in important ways in the late nineteenth century, when the emergence of secular nation-states in Europe and the rise of universal education, literacy, and mass politics began to seriously challenge religion as a source of identity. Although

the Church was far from in universal retreat, its temporal authority had been transformed and limited in real ways. Broadly speaking, the effects on the Vatican were twofold. First, ultramontanism, an ideology and organizational model based on the idea of a centralized Church with a powerful pope, was growing in importance, and Rome was beginning to reassert its influence over the liturgical and devotional lives of national Churches, which were now increasingly under state rule. Ultramontanism was in part a conservative reaction to the growth of liberal politics in Europe, but it was also a result of institutional changes, born out of a perceived need to modernize the Church, which allowed the Vatican to communicate more directly with Churches worldwide and to play a more active role in them. Ultramontanism was not only an elite reaction: it reflected the attitudes of millions of ordinary Catholics, who responded to unsettling social change in their nations by identifying more strongly with the Vatican as a source of social and political authority. This can be seen in the growth of Rome as a pilgrimage site, as well as the growing importance of the pope in the daily lives of Catholics; Pius IX, who reigned from 1846 to 1878, was the first pope to have his image regularly displayed in the homes of European Catholics alongside local and national icons.° The Vatican's second major response to the rise of secular states was to expand the influence of Propaganda Fide, the Vatican’s organ for supporting and overseeing missionary activity, over Catholic missions worldwide. This had begun

during the papacy of Gregory XVI (1831-46), but the process was slow until the papacy of Leo XIII (1878-1903), when the Vatican became concerned that

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missionary organizations such as the MEP were too closely tied not only to national Church hierarchies but also to colonial regimes. Growing involvement in missions, in many ways a logical extension of ultramontanism, also reflected the real belief of many Vatican elite that the Church's future might be outside Europe. In this light, Vatican authorities were uneasy about the state of many Catholic missions. Colonization had undoubtedly allowed evangelizing in more parts of African and Asia than had ever been possible before, but missionaries swept up by the fervor of imperialism had forged ties to colonial regimes in ways that many at the Vatican felt threatened the Church's future outside Europe. In the nineteenth century, this unease did not yet reflect the moral critique of colonial rule that came from Vatican after World War I; Leo XIII’s encyclicals in the 1890s criticizing capitalism left colonialism entirely unmentioned. The unease was nevertheless real, and Rome began to take active steps to place missions more directly under its control. The early stages of the Vaticans movement to reform Catholic missions put into motion the transition to national Churches across the globe that culminated in Vatican II. In the eyes of Rome, the most pressing problem was the inability or unwillingness of many missions to form and sustain a critical mass of local clergy. Leo XIII addressed this problem in his 1893 encyclical Ad Extremas (On Seminaries for Native Clergy), which called for more local clergy, more and better seminaries, and local representation in mission hierarchies, which was almost nonexistent at the time. The Vatican also instituted the first formal hierarchies in missions in Asia, establishing formal dioceses under Vatican authority in India in 1886 and in Japan in 1891. The Vatican also began to name apostolic delegates, papal representatives to a nation with which the Vatican has no formal diplomatic relations, to missions throughout European colonial empires. Propaganda Fide also began to more systematically collect information and statistics about missions, primarily through annual reports and questionnaires, which allowed for a greater degree of scrutiny over mission activities. Finally, Propaganda Fide began to centralize the powerful European fund-raising organs supporting missionary work, especially the Oeuvre de la Propagation de la Foi, by increasing the clerical presence in what had been largely lay organizations and regulating how funds were spent. These reforms, partial before the 1920s, began the process of centralizing and standardizing mission governance that would continue to a greater degree in the interwar era.’

The First World War was a watershed moment in the Vatican's policy toward Catholic missions. For Pope Benedict XV, who became pope just four weeks after the war began, the war seemed a tragic consequence of the Church’s waning place in European life, as Catholic nations ignored the Vatican's appeals for peace and millions of lay Catholics rallied under their national flags. The war also radicalized European politics in a way that seemed to put the Churchss future at risk. The 1917

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Russian Revolution was largely hostile to Christianity, and the spread of communism in European politics after the war raised the specter of Soviet anticlericalism moving west. The war was not all bad for the Church; the pope's remarkable diplomacy and relief efforts increased the prestige of the papacy in the eyes of many European leaders, and the rise of communism began to realign the political activities of the Vatican with large swaths of the laity under Benedict XV’s successor Pius XI, who reigned from 1922 to 1939. But in confirming the primacy and destructive power of the nation-state and mass politics, the war dealt a terrible blow to the Vatican's conception of European civilization that radically altered Romes understanding of its place in the world.° For Benedict XV and other Vatican officials taking stock at the end of the war, the status of Catholic missions was an immediate concern. Most were in a much worse state in 1918 than they had been four years earlier. Mass mobilization devastated many missionary societies, and the hardships of war slowed donations from Europe to support missionary work. This was the case in Vietnam, where the war's effects were profound even if few missionaries from the country died in the trenches. Many of the dozens of missionaries who left Vietnam to fight in France did not return, for reasons of family, injury, or mental health. Some were forced to leave their missions to attend to others left by departed missionaries or to staff vacated positions in colonial hospitals and other institutions. Because the MEP accepted almost no new seminarians during the war, few new missionaries went to Vietnam in the early 1920s. It was also harder for the MEP to attract seminarians after the war; recruitment to both the secular clergy (priests) and the regular clergy (religious orders) declined in France in the 1920s.’ And missionaries who did return to Vietnam were often wounded, physically or otherwise. In 1922, the bishop of Vinh noted that one missionary “could have continued to render service for a number of years, if he was like everyone else. But given his condition and the

turn of his spirit, it is one thousand times better that he return to France.” The wars effects were thus immediate and palpable. “The old missionaries are dying, the young are mobilized,’ wrote Victor Quinton, later bishop of Saigon, in August 1919. “If this continues, before long I'll be alone with the indigenous priests.” Quinton’s comment revealed another growing concern: age. Youth and inexperience had been a problem during the MEP’s expansion, but a generation later the missionaries having too much experience was becoming a problem. In 1900, the average age of the 325 MEP missionaries in Vietnam was thirty-eight; in 1927, there were seventy-nine fewer missionaries and their average age was over fifty-

one.” Old age made it harder for missionaries to cover the distances between parishes, and it made them more susceptible to sickness and exhaustion. During the 1920s and 1930s, missionaries increasingly retreated from active roles as district heads and took positions in cities or as teachers in seminaries. As Damien Grangeon, bishop of Qui Nhon, wrote in 1923, “according to the official total of

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our clergy, East Cochinchina appears as the best formed of our missions: fifty-five missionaries ... for 66,000 faithful and 2,500,000 pagans: it's practically luxury,

relatively speaking... but of this elevated number, we must take away, without even counting an average of three who are regularly absent for reasons of health,

eight more who seem unable—or unwilling—to come back... a ninth... away indefinitely, and five who are already retired.”” He closed with a plea for more missionaries, but the MEP now had fewer to send.

Money, a perennial issue, also became a bigger problem after the war. As the missionary movement declined in France, so did donations to missionary organizations. For the MEP, this put the cost of supporting a missionary into sharper relief; although the solution to problems in a mission had always been to send for more missionaries, this now created as many problems as it solved. In 1926, the head of the MEP noted that a large part of the society's allocations to missions in Vietnam was spent on travel to and from the region.” And once a missionary was in Vietnam, the cost of supporting him was much greater than the cost of supporting a local priest or catechist. Financial statements for the Hanoi mission for 1928-29 show that the MEP spent 91,550 piasters to support just thirty-two missionaries (on average, 2,861 piasters per missionary), but only 26,200 piasters to support 131 local priests (191 piasters per priest).” Catechists were even cheaper, as a bishop noted: “A catechist, thanks be to God!, does not cost us four hundred francs per month, not even one-tenth that, but it’s still a problem for us to make ends meet at the end of the year.”® The Great Depression of the 1930s was a huge blow as well, as it slowed revenues from France and Rome and brought down the value of mission agricultural products. In the eyes of the Vatican, therefore, Catholic missions in Vietnam and around the world faced a crisis at the end of the war. Local Churches outside Europe remained institutionally underdeveloped even after a century of missionary revival. The explosion of imperial activity in the late nineteenth century drew some missionaries into cooperation with colonial rule that did real damage to the Church: in the words of Claude Prudhomme, “even while some missionaries courageously served as a recourse and protection from colonial abuses, others manifested a widespread complaisance for a domination with little respect for individuals” in a way that affected their roles as religious authorities and hurt relations with local populations.” Finally, a precipitous decline in missionary recruitment and resources risked leaving Churches outside Europe unprepared to face the future. It was in response to this crisis that Benedict XV and Pius XI issued two revolutionary papal proclamations on Catholic missions, which some historians identify as nothing less than the beginning of Catholic decolonization.” Benedict XV’s 1919 apostolic letter Maximum Illud (On the Propagation of the Faith Throughout the World), the first explicit statement of Rome's postwar vision for the global Church, marked a decisive change in the relationship between

94 CHAPTER 3 Rome, missions, and colonial regimes. The pope was clear that he saw ties between missionaries and colonial regimes as un-Christian: It would be a tragedy indeed if an apostolic man were to spend himself in attempts

to increase and exalt the prestige of the native land he once left behind him.... [S]uppose it becomes clear that he is involved in worldly schemes of some kind, and that, instead of devoting himself exclusively to the work of the apostolate, he is serving the interests of his homeland. ... [S]uch a situation could easily give rise to the conviction that the Christian religion is the national religion of some foreign people and that anyone converted to it is abandoning his loyalty to his own people and submitting to the pretensions and dominations of a foreign power.

Benedict XV criticized missionaries who “displayed more zeal for the profit of some particular nation than for the growth of the kingdom of God” and accused some of twisting evangelization into a form of spiritual and cultural colonialism. “We can hardly commend a man,” he wrote, “who takes the section of the Lord's vineyard that has been allotted to him for cultivation, and proceeds to treat it as a piece of private property.’ Benedict XV felt that the Church was insufficiently responsive to local cultures and bemoaned that most missionaries knew just “a smattering” of local languages, calling for more linguistic and cultural training. But Maximum Illud did more than simply reaffirm missionary supranationalism. Indeed, Benedict XV made it clear that the only way to develop the Church outside Europe was to expand the ranks and roles of local clergy. Only “the local priest, one with his people by birth, by nature, by his sympathies and his aspirations, the pope claimed, is “effective in appealing to their mentality and thus attracting them to the faith.’ Difficulties arose not because the “native priest” was inferior to the missionary but because he had been “trained merely to perform the humbler tasks of the ministry.” Indeed, the most visionary aspect of Maximum Illud was that it imagined the end of missionary Catholicism: “Wherever the local

clergy exist in suficient numbers, and are suitably trained and worthy of their holy vocation,’ the pope wrote, “there you can justly assume that the work of the missionary has been successful and that the Church has laid her foundations well” The missionary should then leave, “leaving the harvest to be reaped by others.” Benedict XV passed away three years after issuing Maximum Illud, but Pius XI reaffirmed its principles in his 1926 encyclical Rerum Ecclesiae. Pius XI also focused on the problems of the relegation of local clergy to auxiliary roles, limited missionary knowledge of local languages and cultures, and the ruinous effects of the war. In light of the politically restive climate in many colonies, he also anticipated that imperial collapse might make missionary work impossible: “Let us suppose... that either because of the fortunes of war, or because of certain political happenings in a mission field, the ruling government is changed in that territory and that the new government decrees or requests that the missionaries of a certain

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nationality be expelled’’ Pius XI noted that this might occur not only because of imperial rivalry, but also because of revolution: “Let us suppose . . . that the inhabitants of a particular territory ... desiring to become free and independent, should drive away from their country the governor, the soldiers, the missionaries of the foreign nation to whose rule they are subject.... Everyone can see what great harm would accrue to the Church in that land... unless a native clergy had been spread beforehand.” Like Maximum IIllud, Rerum Ecclesiae directly questioned the racial inequalities

that had grown in missions during the nineteenth century: “Anyone who looks upon these natives as members of an inferior race or as men of low mentality makes a grievous mistake. Experience over a long period of time has proven that the inhabitants of those remote regions of the East and of the South frequently are not inferior to us at all, and are capable of holding their own with us, even in mental ability. If one discovers an extreme lack of ability to understand among those who live in the very heart of certain barbarous countries, this is largely due to the conditions under which they exist.” Pius XI emphasized that, unlike in colonial

regimes, there must be no separation between Europeans and others within the Church: “These priests have been admitted to the same priesthood that the missionaries possess . . . for it is they who will one day govern the churches and Catholic communities founded by your sweat and labor. Therefore, there should exist no discrimination of any kind between ... missionaries or natives, there must be no line of demarcation marking one off from the other.” Benedict XV and Pius XI put these ideas into practice with widespread reforms to mission policy and administration. One such reform was to use papal institutions to coordinate the expansion into missions of Catholic societies and orders focused on developing self-sustaining Churches. In Vietnam these included the

Congregation of the Holy Redeemer, or Redemptorists (Dong Chua Cuu The), who came from Canada and became active around Hanoi and Hué. Other important new orders were the French Société de Saint-Sulpice, or Sulpicians, who came to run Tonkinss first central seminary, and the Société des Auxiliares des Mis-

sions (SAM), a Belgian order committed to forming national Churches in Asia. Although there were few SAM missionaries in Vietnam before the 1940s, their networks were important to Vietnamese Catholic nationalists in Europe after 1945. The postwar years also saw the arrival or expansion of many contemplative orders that diversified and internationalized the European presence in Vietnamese Catholic life, even if often they did not work actively to develop a local Church. These included the Benedictines (Dong Bién Dtic), Cistercians (Dong Xit6 Thanh Gia), Franciscans (Dong Phanxicdé), and Carmelites (Dong Cat Minh ). As Propaganda Fide’s administrative presence in missionary life grew, other reforms gave Rome more control over mission finances. One important change was Rome's decision in 1922 to place the Oeuvre de la Propagation de la Foi under

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Vatican control. Before then, Rome had chosen where new missions would be founded and entrusted them to missionary societies, but Lyon by and large controlled the allocation of the funds that the OPF raised. The OPF essentially had been a national organization since its creation in 1822. Even in the 1890s, French donations accounted for about two-thirds of all donations to the OPF. But this began to change: in 1913, French donations made up about a third of worldwide gifts, and by 1922, they comprised only a quarter.” Propaganda Fide’s decision was thus less a power play than a necessary measure; as one article about the transfer put it, “The august pontiff thought that Catholics from foreign countries would offer much more opulent liberalities to the Propagation of the Faith if they were rid of the obligation of sending them through France.” This nevertheless prompted such discontent among French Catholics that a representative of Propaganda Fide had to formally respond to accusations that Rome had made the transfer to favor German missionary groups.” Although the transfer of the OPF did not lead to major changes in mission budgets, it gave Propaganda Fide more authority over the MEP at a time when the two were beginning to clash over mission policy. Leading these important changes was a new group of Vatican elite firmly committed to developing national Churches in Asia and Africa. Perhaps the most im-

portant was Cardinal Willem Marinus van Rossum, a Dutch Redemptorist, who as prefect of Propaganda Fide from 1918 to 1933 laid the foundations for Romes postwar mission reforms. His successor, Pietro Fumasoni Biondi, shared a commitment to developing national Churches, and he began to do so in Japan after being named its first apostolic delegate in 1919. In 1922, Benedict XV also named Celso Costantini as the first apostolic delegate to China, and his activities on behalf of the local clergy quickly drew him into conflict with European missionaries there. After he left China in 1933, Costantini became secretary of Propaganda Fide under Fumasoni Biondi. These men played powerful roles in reshaping Catholic Churches in Asia after the war. Emboldened by papal blessing, proponents of mission reform were vocal after the war, when they made the issue of building national Churches more visible. Much of this was accomplished through the missionary press. Rome directed the OPF journal Missions Catholiques more closely after 1922, and it began to give more narrative depth to the one-dimensional image of the loyal, subservient native priest that had filled its pages in the past. Newer, more progressive journals such as Bulletin des Missions and Revue des Missions were also enthusiastic about building local Churches, and at times they openly criticized the MEP’s efforts to develop the local clergy. In 1925, Le Revue Catholique des Idées et des Faits criticized

the “overdeveloped instinct of authority” of MEP missionaries in Pondicherry in India, “French if possible, white in all cases,’ which feared above all else “an Indian,

priest or lay, on equal footing as a Frenchman.” And through Fides, a Vatican

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news agency created in 1927, Rome began to spread its own vision for the Catholic world further than ever before.

The new policies and culture in Rome represented a substantial break from practices in many missions, and Propaganda Fide and the leadership of missionary societies worked hard to convert their members to the changes now upon them. In the 1920s, van Rossum was in close contact with the head of the MEP, Jean de Guébriant, and de Guébriant made reform a regular focus of his letters to the society. In one letter published shortly after Rerum Ecclesiae, de Guébriant argued that the MEP’s role had now become “to remove the last inequalities that still subsist because of the racial difference between missionaries and indigenous priests” and “to cede way to the indigenous clergy in each mission.” Missionaries, he wrote, “should no longer envision cessions of new territories to European missions’ and “must at all costs avoid the impression that the pope's instructions on any of the points concerning the training of the indigenous clergy are a dead letter.” He emphasized that this “has been the program of the society since its beginnings, and that the new policies “echoed the most ancient and authentic traditions of our society.” This letter was typical of efforts by Propaganda Fide and the leadership of missionary societies like the MEP to represent reforms not as a break from recent history, which they decidedly were, but as the purpose of the missionary enterprise since its beginnings. The postwar push to develop a national Church in Vietnam certainly had the support of some in the MEP. Jean-Baptiste Roux, head of the major seminary at An Ninh, wrote some of the most extended accounts of the lives and deaths of Vietnamese martyrs, as well as profiles of the local clergy for French missionary journals. In a 1930 talk entitled “The Annamite Indigenous Clergy,’ delivered to retired missionaries in Vichy, Roux presented changes in Catholic life in Vietnam as the happy fruit of missionary labors.” The missionary scholar Léopold Cadiére was perhaps the most eloquent spokesperson for a self-directing local Church. In a 1929 article, Cadiére evoked an idealized view of Catholicism in Vietnam in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, an age when “there was ... between Europeans and natives a certain equality of thought and feeling that eliminated any untimely and unjust racial pride.’ Cadiére felt that missionaries and Vietnamese priests had once been considered equals but that this perspective had been lost over time. Tellingly, Cadiére blamed this on the “spirit of conquest” that “imbued all Europeans, even missionaries, one based on “the intimate conviction that white people were superior to people of color,’ which had led many Europeans to “think too much of themselves, to the detriment of the people with whom they lived.” Cadiére concluded that racial difference, the basis of many of the hierarchies in Catholic life in Vietnam, was a byproduct of history rather than a reflection of biological inequality and that it should no longer be relevant. “People are the same everywhere, he wrote, “and everywhere they are driven by the same

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passions, some for the good, some for the bad. From the point of view where we need to place ourselves, there are no races, there are only individuals.” But despite the authority of Propaganda Fide and some support from within the MEP, putting Maximum IIllud and Rerum Ecclesiae into practice in Vietnam was a long, difficult, and divisive process. Vatican reforms in the interwar years created direct ties between Rome and Vietnam that did not pass through any missionary organizations, led to a broader seminary network with more modern and rigorous curricula, and gave Vietnamese representation in their own Church hierarchy. This put Vietnamese priests into positions of power in the Church that they had not held in living memory, at times ever. The growing scrutiny of racial hierarchies in religious life raised troubling ecclesiastical questions for missionaries, and equally troubling political questions for French officials. In short, by the late colonial period, changes in Catholic life in Vietnam had produced a Church whose structures and relationship to mission and colonial authorities were vastly different than they were a generation before.

ROMAN REFORMS AND THE FOUNDATIONS OF A NATIONAL CHURCH In August 1922, a Vietnamese Catholic named Nguyén Hiiu Bai went to Rome to meet the pope (fig. 6). Born in Quang Tri in 1863, Bai went to study at the MEP seminary in Penang when he was ten. He returned to Vietnam in 1884 to work as an interpreter in Tonkin, served as provincial governor (b6 chinh) in Thanh Hoa and then as part of the emperor’s mission in Saigon, and then worked as a representative of the court on a mission to France in 1902. Afterward Bai returned to Hué and to a court in turmoil. In 1907, the French declared the emperor Thanh Thai insane and exiled him to the island of Réunion. This marked total French control over the Vietnamese monarchy, which deeply affected those who had fought to preserve the sacred nature of the office. This included Bai and his fellow Catholic and friend Ng6 Dinh Kha, minister of rites, grand chamberlain, and the father of nine, including Ngo Dinh Thuc, who would later became the third Vietnamese bishop, and Ng6 Dinh Diém, the future president of the Republic of Vietnam. A well-known proverb from the period demonstrates how people recognized and admired their devotion to the monarchy: “To dethrone the king you must get rid of Kha; to open the king’s tomb you must get rid of Bai.” In 1908, Bai became part of the privy council (co mat vién), the advisory council to the Vietnamese emperor and a powerful political force in the protectorate of Annam. Thereafter, his positions as minister of public works and minister of the interior and finance on the co mat vién made him an important figure in politics and a crucial intermediary between the MEP and French officials. In 1915 Bai was named an officer in the French Legion of Honor, and in 1916 he led an inquiry

THE BIRTH OF A NATIONAL CHURCH 99

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