Catholic Vietnam: A Church from Empire to Nation

Epilogue. A National Church Divided

242 Epilogue A national Church divided In late 1954, a book titled A History of Persecutions in Vietnam appeared in stores in the chaos of post-Geneva Saigon. The author, a Catholic named trần minh tiết, lost thirteen family members during the First Indochina War. he fled his home in central Vietnam as part of a mass exodus of hundreds of thousands of Catholics from north to south from mid-1954 until late 1955. For tiết, as for many of his fellow refugees, the trauma of war and displacement echoed the martyr stories that he had heard in church sermons and had read about in school as a child. “Like during the reigns of minh-mang, Thieu-tri, and tu-duc,” wrote tiết, “the current era of ho Chi minh has brought to our Church under a more hypocritical form just as much blood and fire as the tragic years of last century.” In the book’s final chapter, tiết told stories about murdered priests, interned missionaries, pillaged churches, burned schools, and faithful that were displaced during the recent war, which, for him, revealed the truth about the regime he had just fled: “Catholics, who make up 10 percent of the population and are one of the most vibrant elements of the nation,” he wrote, are “martyred and pillaged by Vietminh communists .”1 tiết’s modern martyr story soon had an international audience. most Catholic refugees who left north Vietnam did so on American ships under the Passage to Freedom program, and American journalists and Catholics assisting in the operation transformed the exodus into a Cold War story of Christianity and freedom fighting the evils of godless communism.2 As tiết fled south, an observer named hoàng Linh, sent by drV officials to interview refugees gathering in Phát diệm in preparation for departure, wrote his own impressions of the bắc di cư. For Linh, “the truth in Phát diệm” (the title he chose for his pamphlet on the subject) was that Catholic fears of persecution and A National Church Divided 243 martyrdom were the result of a propaganda campaign waged by “the criminals of the ngô Đình diệm gang, American henchmen, and French reactionaries” trying to undermine Vietnam’s national revolution. Linh’s characterization of ordinary Catholics, less militant, was still patronizing: propaganda had “mesmerized and confused our comrades to emigrate south,” whether through promises of free land and water buffalo or threats that they would lose their souls if they did not leave.3 Similarly, communist revolutionaries thinking about contemporary events in terms of a national past saw the tensions between many Catholics and the drV as part of a long historical struggle between “the nation” and “foreign” elements. In 1952, the revolutionary intellectual nguyễn Văn nguyễn argued, “French colonialists used the belief of our Catholic compatriots in God, who were led by priests to accept the machine of colonial rule, giving it more strength in repressing and exploiting the people.”4 This idea would soon find fertile ground in revolutionary historiography and in drV criticisms of rVn regimes led by the Catholics ngô Đình diệm and nguyễn Văn Thiệu, and it remains a powerful trope in Churchstate relations and an important part of popular conceptions of Catholicism in contemporary Vietnam. Catholics who were part of the bắc di cư, however, had reasons for leaving and experiences afterward that defy such easy explanations. Few were, as Linh’s pamphlet claimed, simple instruments of foreign propaganda. As the head of CIA psywar efforts in north Vietnam Edward Landsdale himself said, “People don’t just pull up their roots and transplant themselves because of slogans. They honestly feared what might happen to them, and their emotion was strong enough to overcome their attachment to their land, their homes, and their ancestral graves. So the initiative was very much theirs—and we mainly made the transportation possible.”5 For the foreign observers who sympathized with the departing Catholics , or instrumentalized them for political purposes, the bắc di cư were leaving for one very simple reason: to preserve their religious freedom. These observers were at least partially correct, for many refugees understood their recent experience of drV repression in the context of the history of the Catholic faith in general and their Church in particular. As Peter hansen notes, the exodus of the people of Israel from Egypt was a...