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177 6 The Culture and Politics of Vietnamese Catholic nationalism ngô Đình Thục was ordained bishop on may 4, 1938. In his speech, his first thanks went to rome, his “spiritual and intellectual homeland,” and especially to Pope Pius XI and the head of Propaganda Fide for acting as “guides of my first steps in the Episcopal path.” When Thục thanked the mEP, still a powerful presence in Vietnamese Catholic life, he described the society as a loyal servant of rome whose time had passed: having built “with their sweat and fertilized with their blood” a Vietnamese Church, the mEP now offered it “to the Vatican with all the pride of their apostle’s heart.”1 he repeated this theme in his first pastoral letter, which made it clear that Vietnamese priests would take charge in the new diocese, since their “holiness, intellect, and education are in no way inferior to that of European missionaries.” because the pope “loves, respects, and trusts Vietnamese to the extent of trusting several hundred thousand souls in the hands of a Vietnamese bishop,” Thục wrote, “this diocese is a diocese of rome. . . . to disobey that is to disobey the Vatican itself.”2 Thục’s explicit view on the meaning of his ascension elicited different responses. Some missionaries were apparently so unhappy with Thục’s ordination that they refused to serve under him in the new diocese.3 on the other hand, as one Sûreté official noted, “The ordination was received very favorably in nationalist and Caodaist milieus,” which intensified the growing suspicions of French officials about the ngô family’s politics.4 Thục’s ordination, just two years before World War II thrust Vietnam into the global currents of decolonization, illustrates the complex relationship between new ideas of nationhood emerging in the late colonial era and the political identities these inspired. For many Vietnamese Catholics, the turn away from missionary authority meant transcending Catholicism’s difficult past in Vietnam and its 178 chapter 6 ties to France, and it helped them begin to imagine a new future for their Church in a nation free from colonialism. At the same time, however, growing conceptions of “Vietnam” as a single cultural and historical community and the rise of leftist anticolonial movements often hostile toward Catholicism began to challenge Catholic claims to national belonging. because many Vietnamese Catholics had an ambiguous relationship to new ideas about Vietnamese nationalism, they regularly looked to the global Catholic world as they defined new political identities in the late colonial era. These international connections continued to highlight Catholicism’s status as a minority religion in new and potent ways in Vietnam. however, they also created disparate, even opposed conceptions of Vietnamese Catholic nationalism, as ideologies and movements ranging from Social Catholicism to anticommunism came to shape political choices during the era of imperial collapse and decolonization. CAthoLICS And thE QUEStIon oF nAtIonAL bELonGInG For many Vietnamese Catholics in the late colonial era, their place in the national community was self-evident, even natural. Increasingly widespread conceptions of an ethnic (dân tộc) or racial (chủng tộc) community allowed Catholics to claim national belonging while sidestepping the question of religion. This kind of thinking relied heavily on two related if different ideas central to intellectual life in the late colonial era. The first was the idea of discrete “Eastern” and “Western” civilizations and races, and the second was the new perception of difference between the Vietnamese, Lao, and Cambodian parts of Indochina, as well as between kinh and ethnic “minorities.”5 Such ideas were at the center of Catholic claims of national belonging that made no reference to religion at all. In one typical article in the Catholic journal Đa Minh Bán Nguyệt, one Vân trình defined “nation” (nước) as “the earth [đất] cultivated by our fathers, the boundless lands, the mountains and rivers,” where there lived “a great family of people of a common race [nòi giống], customs [phong tục], discipline [kỷ luật], history [lịch sử], etc.”6 “Pray to God,” wrote huỳnh Phúc yên, editor of Công Giáo Đồng Thinh, “to be faithful to the people [quốc dân], to have a heart for one’s race, to have a loving spirit: may the three regions of north, center, and south be as one.”7 most Catholics thinking about national community, however, felt a...

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