Benedictine Monastic Communitas in Wartime Central Vietnam (1954–75)

Abstract

This article focuses on the question of the establishment of a Catholic monastic tradition, shaped by its Western creation and subsequent exportation to an Asian society. In 1954 the French Benedictine Congregation of St. Bathilde of Vanves founded a monastery in Central Vietnam. The circumstances of the Vietnam war, coupled with a holistic implementation plan instigated by the nuns, enabled the establishment of a small, but sedentary and durable, community, organised within Benedictine structures involving a girls’ hostel, plantation agriculture and catechism instruction. Choosing a life of self‐denial alongside the indigenous people, they eventually formed a ‘Benedictine community village’, implementing a non‐monastic but austere and disciplined life. However, these Benedictine nuns continuously self‐transformed and re‐defined themselves vis‐à‐vis their ‘spiritual tradition’. The pursuit of a life of interiority produced a form of rupture with older forms of evangelisation and with established clergy, reflecting the way in which these nuns conceived their alternative role in the Benedictine tradition. I interrogate here the Benedictine ascetic form and the place given by the Order to new alternative subjectivities.