11 - Miracles and Myths: Vietnam Seen through Its Catholic History

Summary

Vietnamese Catholicism has a rich store of myths and miracles and its own heretics and gnostics. Indeed, the story of Catholicism's reception and interaction with local religious culture, and the history of its intersection with the Vietnamese state — from dynastic to recent times, over the last 400 years — is as complex as it is long. Underpinning this heritage is the influence of the myth, as widely expressed in French colonial, post-independence Vietnamese and Western scholarship, of Catholicism's essential foreignness. Introduced by Western missionaries from the late 1500s and more forcefully imposed by French priests during the colonial era — the myth proposes — the religion was anathema to local tradition. Because missionaries sought to impose the religion in absolute terms, placing obedience to God above loyalty to the temporal authority, Christianity could not but be rejected by the Confucian order (Buttinger 1958). With only a small and marginal following, the religion was rejected by the mainstream, and hence the faith never attained harmony with local ways (Lê 1975). Vietnamese Catholics, who subsequently became surrogates of their imperial masters, turned their backs on traditional culture, creating a rift within mainstream society (Kiệm 2001).

Yet, as powerful as this shorthand overview of Catholic history is, like all myths and cursory interpretations of social conflict it clouds a complex reality. Certainly mission successes in converting tens of thousands of Vietnamese from the seventeenth century can be attributed to Catholicism's absolutist spiritualism. But we cannot assume all converts were attracted to the religion simply on this basis alone, or that, having converted, Catholics could not accommodate loyalty to local political authority with their beliefs. Buddhism is also an imported belief systems, but in contrast to Catholicism is regarded in popular discourse as essential to Vietnamese tradition. It would be unthinkable to consider personal identification with Buddhist beliefs as anathema to one's position within the political order.

For all the violence generated by Catholicism's integration, the religion has become arguably just as much a Vietnamese faith as Buddhism and for that matter, Confucianism.