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118 4 Vietnamese Catholic tradition on trial ngô tử hạ was born poor in ninh bình province, not far from the majestic cathedral at Phát diệm, in 1882. hạ was intelligent enough to obtain some schooling, and he eventually left his village for hanoi, one hundred kilometers and a world away, where he found work as a low-level administrator in the growing French bureaucracy. he saved carefully until he had enough to purchase a small piece of property. by his thirties, hạ had become wealthy enough to go into business for himself. however, he avoided more conventional paths to wealth in favor of a growing new industry—the world of print. In 1915, hạ founded a printing press that became one of hanoi’s more successful and longest lasting, printing everything from colonial decrees to short stories. The printing business made him a wealthy man. by 1945 he was one of the most influential men in hanoi, and he became a member of hồ Chí minh’s first government and an intermediary between democratic republic of Vietnam officials and the Catholic communities in his home region. his press printed the first paper money of the revolutionary state. ngô tử hạ rose to wealth and power by channeling one of the most dynamic forces in Vietnamese society during his lifetime. As david marr and others have shown, the rapid rise of romanized Vietnamese (quốc ngữ) in the early twentieth century, both as a bureaucratic tool and as a vehicle for social reform and modernization , contributed to a rise in literacy and made print a principal medium for the cultural transformations of the colonial era. This revolution in consciousness, by exposing Vietnamese to an unprecedented range of new ideas about self and society, was critical to both the growing sense of national community and the new forms of opposition to French rule that emerged in the late colonial era. however, as the diverse and often deeply opposed efforts to understanding the social changes Vietnamese Catholic Tradition on Trial 119 and political challenges of the time suggest, these revolutions in consciousness were both multiple and transnational at their core, as intellectual currents from Europe, the United States, China, Japan, and many other places shaped Vietnamese movements from literary modernism to communism in very different ways. In Vietnamese Catholic life, the spread of the printed word meant growing exchange with the global Catholic world. Priests and catechists increasingly drew from a worldwide network of theological texts and ideas in their training and vocation, and new genres from novels to news briefs helped lay Catholics to think of and experience their faith in relationship to the cultural changes swirling around them. PrInt In CAthoLIC LIFE bEForE thE tWEntIEth CEntUry: FoUndAtIonS And trAnSFormAtIonS Vietnamese Catholicism had been a site of vibrant intellectual and literary activity since the seventeenth century. This was partly due to missionaries, who were important producers and disseminators of knowledge. The best known of these missionaries was Alexander de rhodes, a Jesuit from Avignon who arrived in Đàng trong in 1624 and spent most of the next two decades in both Vietnamese kingdoms . de rhodes came to Đại Việt at a time when the Society of Jesus was preparing for what it hoped would be a major expansion in the country. Language was, as always, a challenge; as de rhodes wrote, “when I arrived in Cochinchina and when I heard the natives, especially the women, speak, I had the impression of hearing the twittering of birds, and I despaired of ever being able to learn it.”1 Jesuits began studying spoken Vietnamese upon their arrival, but many did not know classical Chinese or chữ nôm, the demotic script to write vernacular Vietnamese. Without a recognizable medium to help transcribe the language they were trying to learn, Jesuits began to develop one using the roman alphabet. This process began well before de rhodes arrived, but in the absence of most of the manuscripts on which de rhodes based his work, it is not clear to what extent he “invented” what later became known as quốc ngữ (national script) or simply organized and systematized work by his predecessors.2 In either case, de rhodes’s labors produced the first known published works in the medium, a Vietnamese-Portuguese-Latin dictionary and a catechism, both published in 1651.3 The Catholic origins of the script that would become ubiquitous in modern Vietnam obscures, even caricatures, the complex cultural...

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