Catholic Vietnam: A Church from Empire to Nation. By Charles Keith. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012. 333 pp. $49.95 hardcover.

Abstract

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)Catholic Vietnam: A Church from Empire to Nation . By Charles Keith . Berkeley : University of California Press , 2012. 333 pp. $49.95 hardcover.Book Reviews and NotesCatholic Vietnam: A Church from Empire to Nation, by Charles Keith, is a well-written and brilliantly researched investigation into the history of the church in colonial Vietnam. By exploring the trajectory of the church-congregant relationship, Keith provides a narrative that is significant not only for the colonial period, but for understanding the politics of early years of independence that led up to the U.S.-Vietnam War. In his analysis of the colonial period, Keith argues that while the French missionary-run church certainly affected inequalities that correlated with race, congregants and indigenous priests nonetheless maintained their faith in part because they developed ties to global Catholic community. After World War I, when Vatican reforms allowed for a national church to develop, Vietnamese Catholics came to envision themselves as part of a Vietnamese national, as well as a global, Catholic community. Consequently, Vietnam's Catholics began to reconsider their relationship with missionaries and colonialism, leaving the church in Vietnam deeply divided.The forte of Catholic Vietnam is its methodology. The author draws from a vast empirical base of Vietnamese and French language sources including church archives in the Vatican; the League of Human Rights archives, the Societe de Saint Sulpice archives, and the Foreign Missions archives in France; state archives in Vietnam and France; as well as an array of published sources, including Vietnamese- and French-language church bulletins and newspapers. As a result, Catholic Vietnam thoroughly explores the complexities of the colonial Catholic community, its multitude of voices, and the ways in which congregants understood their place as French colonized people in a global Catholic Church. In doing so, this book re-centers the historiographical discussion of the Vietnamese Catholic Church to focus on Vietnamese congregants and the development of a Vietnamese Church.The chapters of Catholic Vietnam are organized chronologically. Keith begins in the late eighteenth century by tracing the development of missionary activity and church life as France established colonial rule in the late nineteenth century. The first chapter--one of the most interesting in the book--reconstructs the village life of Catholic congregants. As a cultural history of the nineteenth century, this chapter is part of a recent refreshing turn in Vietnamese historiography to revisit the Nguyen Century, including recent works by Nguyen Van Marshall, Bradly Davis, and Katie Dyt.Chapter 2 explores how metropolitan debates over the separation of church and state played out in the early years of French colonization, when anticolonial rebels fought the colonial state. Keith found that within the context of this friction between the Catholic Church and the Republican-led colonial administration, the influence of European religious authorities over Catholic life grew repressive. In the 1920s, chapter 3 shows, the Vatican enacted new policies that, among other things, solve this problem as well as that of the decline European religiosity. This chapter demonstrates how those changes made by the Vatican put the Vietnamese Church on the road towards forming an independent national church. …