Persecution of Vietnam Catholics
INTRODUCTION
Nathan Barker incessantly refers to the persecution of various groups through history as if that proves their origins from Jesus. His motives are twofold: 1) to make a case (albeit weak) for the apostolic origins of the 2x2s 2) to discredit the Catholic Church. Unfortunately for Nate, his examples neither prove his wishful thinking nor does the existence of persecution meaning anything, because Catholics have been the most persecuted group of Christians in history. Since Nate is from Vietnam, the following is a poignant reminder of the fates of Catholics in that area:
Vietnam stretches along the coastof Asia south of China and its geography has played a large role in the shaping of its culture and religious history. The early Vietnamese moved slowly down the curve of land alongside the South China Sea. Chinese invaders came after them, establishing Chinse cultural and political dominance in the region for over a thousand years and at intervals thereafter. The Chinese instilled Confucianism in the ruling class. Traders coming to the Red River Delta and Vietnam's good harbors from India added Buddhism to the religious mixture. In the seventeenth century, European explorers brought Christianity. It is only an illusion of perspective , then, that has made it appear to some opponents of Vietnamese Christianity that missionaries constituted a unique colonial element. In fact, they were merely continuing a history, several thousand years old, of the interchange of culture at the crossroads of Vietnam.
The most remarkable figure among the early missionaries was the Catholic French Jesuit Alexandre de Rhodes, who arrived in Hanoi in 1627. An energetic man, he learned Vietnamese quickly and was well received by the royal court. By 1630, when he was expelled - probably because of his growing influence - he had baptized over 6,000 people. In addition, Father de Rhodes wrote a Vietnamese catechism and organized a Vietnamese-Latin-Portugese dictionary. Though he never personally returned to Vietnam, de Rhodes left a large influence on the country's subsequent history.
For Christianity persisted in Vietnam despirt persecutions. As in other parts of the world, changing policital alignments might favor or harm religious interests. Vietnamese rulers martyred both Buddhists and Christians at different times. In the 19th Century, growing French colonialism in Vietnam promoted Catholicism and evoked a backlash. Vietnam became a French Protectorate in 1883, partly owing to sheer force of arms but also because the ruling dynasty had become badly out of touch with the people. Some Vietnamese, non-Christians among them, welcomed the French as perhaps a force that might modernize a still largely feudal system. But in the fifty years prior to the French takeover, somewhere between 100,000 and 300,000 Catholics were slaughtered or persecuted. The Vatican later beatified 117 of these 19th Century martyrs.
Within a few years, there were over 700,000 Catholics in Vietnam. But the situation of the French - especially after their defeat by the Nazies and need to rebuild their own nation after the war - became more and more precarious. In 1954, owing to the Geneva Armistice Agreements, the country was partitioned at the 17th Parallel into a Communist North and democratic South. As the French began to withdraw and American troops began to replace them in the South, the Communist movement in the North, led by Ho Chi Minh, was establishing itself. By that time, there were close to 1,600,000 Catholics in the country, all but 480,000 in the Communist-dominated regions. Persecution of believers began immediately and 670,000 Catholics plus another 210,000 non-Catholics left their native lands and fled to the South. The rest were forced to stay in the North; bishops, priests, other Catholic religious and laity frequently wound up in prison. Ironically, as in other parts of Asia that turned Communist, North Vietnam used a European ideology, allegedly with the aim of throwing off European influence. Ho Chi Minh had studied Marxism in Paris.
The Geneva Agreements had stipulated that the Vietnamese people would be given three hundred days in which to decide where they wanted to live. Even before the agreement, Communist forces had intimidated and arrested those wishing to leave, blockading roads, rivers, and other ways of escape. Boats were commandeered. They demanded that anyone wishing to emigrate possess a "travel permit" which they made difficult to obtain. Many of the Catholics of Tonkin, one of the traditional centers of Vietnamese Catholicism, made the journey south anyway by moving down canals and rice paddies. Some died in overloaded sampans or in the shipwreck of makeshift rafts. Others were intercepted by armed patrols. Once the Vietnamese Communists took full possession of Hanoi, they used vast armed forces to control any movement. The Communists denied that there was a spontaneous exodus. Instead, they proclaimed that fear of the atom bomb, or the bad influence of the Catholic clergy, or American propaganda were responsible. However, when the International Control Commission, at the request of the North, interviewed refugees in the South, not one of them expressed a desire to return to the North. A similar exodus would occur when the North Vietnamese moved into the South after the 1975 U.S. withdrawal: around 1.5 million South Vietnamese sought refuge in various countries, especially the United States.
The North Vietnamese government professed to allow freedom of religion. Ho Chi Minh included messages to Catholics in many of his early speeches. But the actions of the government spoke louder than his words. Priests and prominent believers were harassed and arrested. The people themselves had a good idea of what the new government would mean for religious belief. In the early stages, the persecution was carefully concealed. Once the Vietnam War broke out into the open, howver, the government engaged in open persecutions. Concentration camps and Communist "re-education centers" sprouted around the country. Catholic schools were closed and Catholic philanthropic enterprises curtailed. A "patriotic" Catholic association was formed to try introducing a split between the people and official Catholic institutions. Like all such "patriotic churches" in Communist lands, it was subservient to the government.
Several incidents recounted by eyewitnesses give a sense of the terror:In the village of Haiduong, Viet Minh (Communist) forces entered the school and accused students and teachers of "conspiring" because they had been discussing religion. The punishments were made to fit the several "crimes". Two school children had chopsticks shoved into their ears so that they would never hear such things - or anything - again. The teacher had his tongue held out by pliers and cut off with a bayonet so that he would never speak of religion again. Fortunately, none of the victims died and they were able to escape to the South shortly thereafter.
A priest who had been left at liberty in the North suffered a similar incident. He was allowed to say Mass only between six and seven in the morning when the peasants were already starting work. One evening the local Communist soldiers decided he needed re-education. They hung him by his feet and beat him with bamboos to drive the evil out of him. The altar boys found him hanging in the chapel. The local townspeople smuggled him across the border, where he survived.
Since priests were not good at being re-educated, theyoften encountered even worse. Once was sentenced for "treason" and given a crown of thorns. Eight nails were hammered into his head. He staggered to a nearby hut. The people pulled out the nails and sought medical help from the South. He managed to recover. When he did, he refused to remain in the South, but crossed back over into the North to resume his parish duties.
And these were the lucky ones who managed to survive....Tracing individual martyrs during the tumultuous war in Vietnam is still not easy because, given the continued Communist control over the country, there has been no way to make a comprehensive assessment. It will likely be decades before even part of the story will be known. But we have some representative cases. In June of 1953, two Belgian priests, the Abbes Kunsch and Bruneau, together with a catechist, were forcibly removed from the seminary at Bui-Chu in North Vietnam by the Viet Minh. When the priests refused to take off their cassocks, the clothes were torn off. The priests were tied together and march away. The road they traveled was so muddy that their sandals came off en route. In October, four months later, they were still bound together in a prison camp. Kunsch died from severe dysentery, which had gone untreated, and was buried in an unmarked grave. Bruneau survived until June of 1954, a year after he was first apprehended. Camp conditions killed him as well.
...Archbishop Francois-Xavier was never allowed to take up his new post. As he was en route to Saigon, having already installed his successor in his old diocese of Nha Trang, he was stopped and forced to turn back. On the Feast of the Assumption, August 15, 1975 - a date to which he attached great importance - he was confined to house arrest. Most of the South's bishops were also taken into custody along with a large number of priests, army chaplains, and human rights advocates. They all wound up in re-education camps. The archbishop followed the same route, eventually spending a dozen years in prison, nine years among them in isolation cells. In November 1988, he was released but forbidden to conduct religious services. Three years later, he was expelled from Vietnam. Since the mid-1990's, he has been vice president of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace in Rome.
In many respects, the archbishop's story is all but identical to many others in Vietnam, and even in China and North Korea in recent decades. But his reaction in these sadly familiar situations in the twentieth century was, like Marcel Van's, perhaps a sign of something more hopeful in the future of Vietnam. During his incarceration, he produced a series of spiritual meditations that were smuggled out and copied and became a kind of consolation to Catholics suffering in Vietnam, even those who put their lives in peril as "Boat People". The meditations do not go much into the details of the bishop's trials or those of his fellow prisoners. In fact, he makes a point of not describing the wrongs they suffered very much, precisely, it seems, out of a pastor's desire to find a way past the usual human desire for revenge and dwelling on the hurts inflicted by others: "Many times I suffer deeply because the mass media want to make me tell sensationalistic stories, to accuse, to denounce, to incite opposition, to seek revenge...This is not my goal. My greatest desire is to transmit my message of love, in serenity and truth, in forgiveness and reconciliation." In another place, he advises people to "take your problems to Jesus in the Sacrament and to Mary. Then when the suffering has passed, resist any impulse to recrimination and vengeance. Forget about it, never speak about it again except to say 'Alleluia'".
The archbishop does, however, tell how he turned his many years in prison into a kind of spiritual practice. He recalls Bishop John Walsh, who spent a dozen years in a Chinise Communist prison, as having remarked upon his release, "I spent halft my life waiting." The archbishop, too, felt time heavy on his hands at first and was tormented by thoughts of all the pastoral projects he had to leave undone. The fact that his people were going through many trials without pastoral guidance kept him awake until, one night, he received a powerful inspiration: "Francis, it is very simple. Do what Saint Paul did when he was in prison: write letters to the different communities." From that moment, he decided to make his time in prison fruitful in whatever way God was allowing him to live. Mother Teresa of Calcutta had written him: "What is important is not how many actions we perform, but the intensity of love that was put into each action." In his limited circumstances, he meditated: "How does one achieve this intensity of love in the present moment? I simply think that I must live each day, each minute as the last of my life. To leave aside everything accidental, to concentrate only on the essential. Each word, each gesture, each telephone call, each decision is the most beautiful of my life. I keep my love for everyone, my smile; I am afraid of wasting even one second by living it without meaning."
This was the principle that kept him vibrant during the long years of imprisonment. Among the worst moments were periods in the hold of a ship with fifteen hundred desperate people being transported North. In the Phu-Kkanh prison, he had no windows in his cell and spent the first hundred days with his nose up against a tiny hole for fresh air. During rains, even that relief was taken away; spiders, earthworms, and millipedes rushed in, and he was too weak to drive them away. Worst of all was the simple length of time he spent in solitary confinement. The archbishop confesses that there were whole days when he was so exhausted or ill that not a single conscious prayer passed through his mind.
But over and above these trials, a pure and simple dedication emerged in him. The effect on those he came into contact with was nothing short of miraculous. One Communist guard, impressed by his spirit, promised to pray for him at the partly-destroyed sanctuary of the Madonna of Lavong. The archbishop did not know what to make of this promise, but received a note from the guard shortly after, confirming that he was going weekly and making this touching petition: "I pray for you like this: Madonna, I am not a Christian; I do not know how to pray; I ask you to give Mr. Francis what he desires."
The prayer must have been heard. One thing the archbishop was able to do frequently was say Mass with a little wine, shrewdly labeled "stomach medicine" that he had sent to him, along with the concealed hosts [wafers]. Camp officials noticed that the guards assigned to watch him soon became "contaminated" so they stopped rotating the detail to prevent the contamination from spreading further. He told guards stories of trips abroad, taught them a little French and English. Some of them even began studying Latin; one of them asked the archbishop to teach him a Latin hymn and chose the "Veni Creator". He went around the camp singing the ancient words and music happily. One guard even let the archbishop make a cross and chain out of a piece of wood and some wire. Later, in freedom, it became the archbishop's pectoral cross: "I wear this cross and chain every day, not because they are reminders of prison, but because they indicate my profound conviction, a constant reference point for me: only Christian love can change hearts, not weapons, threats, or the media."
By his own report, he made a point of discussing Christ's command to forgive our enemies with his captors, which led to this exchange: "Do you really love us?"
"Yes, I sincerely love you."
"Even when we treat you so badly? Whenyou suffer because you have been in prison for so many years without a trial?"
"Think about the years we have lived together. I really love you!"
"When you are free, you won't send your people to take revenge on us and our families?"
"No, I will continue to love you, even if you want to kill me."
"But why?"
"Because Jesus has taught me how to love you. If I do not, I am no longer worthy to be called Christian."
Vietnam is still not free and it may be some time before the slow introduction of real charity by figures such as Marcel Van and Cardinal Francois-Xavier Nguyen Van Thuan bears fruit. Churches already seem to be growing quickly. But the experience of countries like Poland and Czechoslovakia suggest that a real resolution will require both charity and a public spirit of truth. In the late 1990s, the Vietnamese government launched another crackdown on both Protestant and Catholic leaders, sending a new wave of mostly unknown believers into detention. Vietnam's Catholic bishops have issued a public statement protesting the move. A dozen members of the Congregation of Mother Coredemptrix have been in prison since 1987. And harsh restrictions seem to be increasing.
Asian societies have a history of long imperial dynasties, and it may take the millennial perspective that John Paul II announced in Ecclesia in Asia before we see a social evolution and powerful evangelization that reforms the tyrannies that have sprung up in the absence of traditional orders. But there is no question that history now seems on the side of the Vans and Thuans and not the ruling cliques that seem so potent in their ideological rigor and intimidation of dissidents. It is the old story of the charity that overcame persecution and tyranny in the ancient world of the West. The new millennium may witness a reproduction of that evangelical revolution in the East.
excerpt from Robert Royal, The Catholic Martyrs of the 20th Century
|back|