Catholic Vietnam: A Church from Empire to Nation

5. A National Church Experienced

147 5 A national Church Experienced on July 22, 1939, three young Vietnamese Catholics boarded a ship in hải Phòng for rome. Along with Catholic youth from more than forty other countries, they were going to represent their nation at the first-ever worldwide gathering of young Catholic Workers, a global association meant to mobilize young Catholics to meet the challenges of industrial work and economic depression.1 young Catholic Workers had grown steadily in Vietnam since the early 1930s, and by the time the three youths left for rome, chapters existed in many cities and in the Catholic heartlands of Phát diệm and bùi Chu. Since 1936, chapters of this and other youth associations from throughout Vietnam had gathered three times for national conferences. The first, in 1936 in nam Định, drew between five and six thousand people, so many that the Pontifical high mass on the first evening was held outside the city in fields known as the bảy mẫu, where thousands of Catholics had died in the 1880s. The event was structured around meetings for students, workers, and rural youth to discuss progress in their own associations, but all marched together, waving their flags, in the procession of the blessed Sacrament.2 Some participants remembered it not only as a spiritual experience but also as a moment that broke down social boundaries and regional differences. For one, the event showed that “Catholics belong to all social classes, all provinces and places from south to north.”3 Another hoped that the event would inspire Catholic unity not only in religious life but also in culture and politics.4 For Vietnamese Catholics like these, as for many others in the colonial era, the new experience of a national religious community was inseparable from growing ties to global Catholicism. In the first half of the twentieth century, Vietnamese Catholics developed a more present and powerful sense of religious community 148 chapter 5 that stretched beyond parish, mission, or region. new economic and bureaucratic structures in the colonial era produced waves of migration and urbanization that brought Catholics into new communities, while the infrastructural expansion of roads, trains, and steamships brought Catholics from across Vietnam into forms of pilgrimage that had once been local or regional. This growing sense of national religious community was also a product of currents in global Catholicism, which brought new forms of association and festivals to Vietnamese Catholic life that linked this nascent national Church more closely to worldwide Catholic institutional networks and cultures. by the late colonial era, Vietnamese Catholic experiences were both more national and more global than ever before. mIGrAtIon, UrbAnIZAtIon, And nEW CAthoLIC CommUnItIES Though the Catholic village (làng đạo) is often caricatured as a closed world, Catholic migration was, in fact, widespread during the colonial era. People migrated temporarily and permanently, out of necessity and desire, to find work, to flee poverty and natural disasters, or simply to build a new life. The colonial economy provided opportunities for people to move, and at times forced them to, and infrastructural changes like new roads, trains, and steamships made it easier to travel far away. migration in this place and time is difficult for historians to grasp: the colonial state had limited control over it, and missionary observers of it usually left only impressionistic accounts. In the colonial era, people who came and went—or who came and never returned—left few traces, and Catholics were no exception. nevertheless, it is clear that for Catholics, Church networks shaped migration in important ways. missionary networks and periodic state repression meant that Vietnamese Catholic migration existed long before the colonial era, and these networks continued to be important during French rule. For example, Vietnamese Catholics migrated to nearby Siam as early as the seventeenth century, when mEP missionaries brought hundreds of families to help buttress the mission there. Siam was a common destination for Catholics escaping nguyễn repression in the first half of the nineteenth century, and some came as Siamese prisoners of war during conflicts with Vietnam in the 1830s and 1840s.5 during a wave of violence against Catholics in central Vietnam in the 1750s, many left for the relative tolerance of Cochinchina.6 during the colonial era, labor replaced repression as the primary reason why Catholics left one place for another. most migration at this time was from tonkin and Annam to Cochinchina, but in the early years of French rule missionaries observed...