In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

208 7 A national Church in revolution and War Father hoàng Quỳnh of Phát diệm was thirty-nine years old when France surrendered to the Axis powers in June 1940. Seven years earlier, the ordination of nguyễn bá tòng inspired Quỳnh, himself recently ordained, to write a history of his Church that saw the first Vietnamese bishop as a realization of centuries of evolution toward religious independence.1 Like many of his fellow priests of this era, Quỳnh believed in Catholic Action’s potential to help the laity to shape its own Church, and he became a chaplain for Catholic youth groups in addition to working as an instructor in Phát diệm’s minor seminary. When the Japanese army occupied Vietnam during World War II, Quỳnh organized communities to share and protect their resources. In the chaos of the war’s end, with myriad international powers competing with local groups to shape Vietnam’s political future, Quỳnh led Catholics in taking up arms against both occupying troops and opposing Vietnamese political forces. during the war between France and the democratic republic of Vietnam from 1946 until 1954, Quỳnh became a leader of Catholic militias in the struggle of the dioceses of Phát diệm and bùi Chu to remain autonomous from both colonialist and communist ambitions. After the victory of the drV and the partition of Vietnam in 1954, Quỳnh led much of his diocese to the newly formed republic of Vietnam, soon to be headed by his Catholic compatriot ngô Đình diệm, alongside hundreds of thousands of northern Catholics. Quỳnh soon became a vocal, iconoclastic political figure in the rVn—a fervent anticommunist, a voice for communitarian dialogue, a critic of corruption, an advocate of a progressive program of agrarian reform and nationalized industry, and a supporter of rural cooperatives and labor unions. he remained in Saigon after 1975 and was arrested thereafter, officially for his role in the resistance to the drV Revolution and War 209 during the 1940s and 1950s. he died in Chí hòa prison in early 1977, by most accounts from beatings and torture. hoàng Quỳnh’s life, though it was certainly atypical, nevertheless captures the transformative effect of decolonization and the cold war on the lives of Vietnamese Catholics. The growth of a national Church in many ways mirrored the political changes of the colonial era, and the desire of Vietnamese Catholics for religious independence and to transcend their community’s difficult past made them enthusiastic supporters of Vietnamese independence in 1945. however, in part because of the powerful institutional and ideological ties between the nascent Vietnamese Church and the global Catholic world, the relations of many Vietnamese Catholics with the revolutionary government and many resistance groups were tense from the start. As the Cold War and internal power struggles polarized the conflict between the French and the drV and among the various Vietnamese groups vying to shape their nation’s future, political strife and the upheavals of war divided and displaced Catholic communities, leaving a nascent national Church with an uncertain future in a divided Vietnam at the war’s end. VIChy rULE And JAPAnESE oCCUPAtIon World War II led to a sea change in the French colonial empire. As Eric Jennings has shown, the Vichy revolution that ended the Third republic also represented “the last spasm of essentialist French colonialism—a form of colonialism steeped in social-darwinist determinism and rooted in a reductionist, organic understanding of other, usually ‘primitive,’ societies and ‘races.’”2 Vichy’s revolutionary vision for the French empire led to a policy based on “wholesale invention and production of ‘authentic folklore,’ the introduction of hardline colonial practices, and an overriding rhetoric of imperial unity.”3 This shaped colonial nationalisms, Vietnamese and other, by helping to distill and disseminate a cultural and historical vision of colonial nationhood and by repressing more moderate elements in French colonial policy. of course, a new colonial regime was not the only wartime change. Japan, seeking to block supply lines to China, to obtain resources for its war effort, and to lay a cornerstone of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, entered northern Vietnam in September 1940 and controlled the rest of the country by 1941, leaving only in August 1945. The occupation, coupled with wartime shortages, price increases, and crop failures, devastated Vietnam, particularly the Catholic heartland of tonkin, where between...

Share