Catholic Vietnam: A Church from Empire to Nation by Charles Keith (review)

Sometimes the subtitle of a book says more exactly what it is about than its title, and this is especially true of this volume. Catholic Vietnam does not deal with the Catholic Church in Vietnam in its current state, nor its entire history from the sixteenth century to our time. Readers, lured by the rather comprehensive title and looking for information on these two topics, will be disappointed, but will be richly rewarded if they want to understand the cultural, political, and ecclesiastical factors that shaped the Vietnamese Catholic Church from the nineteenth century to the first half of the twentieth century—that is, from the founding of the Nguyen dynasty in 1802 by Emperor Gia Long (1762-1820) to the emergence of Vietnam as an independent nation from French colonization (1954).

An expansion of a 2008 doctoral dissertation at Yale University, the book follows a largely chronological method in detailing the highly complex developments of the Vietnamese Catholic Church during this critical 150 years. The thread running through its seven chapters is the power struggle among the Vietnamese political forces (especially imperial, nationalist, and communist), France's political regimes (from the Bourbon Restoration to the Third Republic), the French colonial government in Vietnam, the Vatican, French missionaries, and Vietnamese Catholics. Keith's use of archival materials as well as published documents to trace the twists and turns of the formation of the Catholic Church as a Vietnamese religious organization is magisterial. His richly textured narrative provides a needed correction to both the official communist historiography that paints French missionaries and Vietnamese Catholics as promoters and collaborators of French colonialism and the hagiographic accounts of the French missionary leaders and the Vietnamese Church as innocent and patriotic cheerleaders for national independence.

Of course, a work of this vast historical scope will have to depend on the research of other scholars. In particular, for the role of the Vietnamese Catholic Church in the period between French re-colonizing efforts and communist resistance (1945-54),Keith has made good use of Tran Thi Lien's unpublished dissertation on the theme (chapters 6 and 7).

Chapter 4 is of greatest interest, which is somewhat misleadingly titled "Vietnamese Catholic Tradition on Trial" (its title in the original dissertation is more appropriate: "Spreading the Word: Print and Cultural Change in Colonial Vietnamese Catholicism").Much research remains to be done in this still neglected area of Catholic popular literature to understand how the Vietnamese Catholic Church understood itself in relation to the West and the universal Church. Furthermore, it would be very interesting to explore how the identity of the Vietnamese Catholic Church was shaped by its relationship to the other Vietnamese religious traditions during this period and not exclusively to French colonialism and Vietnamese communism. Another aspect that could fruitfully be studied is the way in which the Vietnamese Catholic Church during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has been influenced not only by the French missionaries (mainly through the Société des Missions Étrangères de Paris) but also through a different, Iberian, spirituality and piety. Finally, for readers who are not familiar with the earlier history of Vietnamese Catholicism, some introductory materials (presented in chapter 1 of the original dissertation) as well as maps (also available in the dissertation) would be very helpful.

These suggestions for further research to understand contemporary Vietnamese Catholic Church detract nothing from the exceptionally high quality of this book. In general, Catholic Vietnam is an excellent historical account of the development of the Catholic Church in Vietnam during its most complex period. The work is a rich treasure-trove of information; its scholarship deep and impeccable; its critique judicious and balanced; its style highly readable. It will remain a standard work in the historiography of the Catholic Church of Vietnam.