THE OPPRESSION

 

 

The elimination of the bourgeoisie after April 1975 brought with it the repression of religions. Being attributed to as hostile elements to the political regime, the Churches were targeted with suspicion and hatred. Religious practices were regarded superstitious. All religions that operated legally and that were nationally recognized by the former Republic of Vietnam were subject to revision. The clergy were placed under State surveillance. Charitable, educational, and cultural establishments were dispossessed. Many of them were brought down for unfounded reasons. Their legitimacy as Church of Cao Dai and Hoa Hao was subject to question. The capacity as clergy of religious faith of priests and monks was disregarded. Local authorities sent home nuns, novices, seminarians, and student priests for "socialist" production.

Approximately 600 military chaplains including Catholic priests, Buddhist monks, and pastors serving the Armed Forces of the Republic of Vietnam were to report with the Military Councils and sent to reeducation. Others were abducted to unknown whereabouts. Still, others were arrested, tortured, and imprisoned on ungrounded charges of counterrevolutionary activities As a consequence of such a Maoist-style repression, all Churches suffered tragic losses. Their human resources wore out due to attrition, their material resources were doomed to exhaustion, and their very religious structures were dismantled. Worse still, their leaders at the highest level were decimated. The Churches faced utmost destruction as they entered a phase of resistance for survival.

 

　

Ideological Premises and the Practices

As soon as it took over the power, the new political regime found itself in face of a society that was abysmally dissimilar in every aspect from the one in the North. In the years that immediately followed 1975, theoreticians and historians of the Party and State, in the light of Maoism, devoted themselves to sophisticated studies of and inquiries into the social, economic, political, and cultural situations of the South. Their conclusions led to a systematic "socialist transformation" based on the examination, evaluation, and delineation of all forms of production of the economy and all social, political, cultural, and religious institutions of the South. Accordingly, the regime carried out the so-called the "Revolution of People’s Democracy," appropriating all the properties of the bourgeoisie, landlords, and religions and transferred their legal ownership to the working class of workers and peasants following the laws and rules of class struggle.

Again, Do Muoi was nominated the Chief of the Trade and Industry Reforms Bureau to execute the plans of "northernization" of the South. In a coordinated effort, this organ set up priorities, liquidating one by one the counter- revolutionary elements, the comprador bourgeoisie, and the religions which it considered the hostile elements to the regime. By means of this s nationalization of private resources, it gradually eradicated the supra- and infra- structure with all their deep-seated political, social, economic, cultural, and religious institutions and values. As in any activity in other sectors of the social life of society, the function of religion was to be redefined. To achieve this purpose, the Communist rule decreed a new law providing the rules and regulations to place the religions under State control.

     

　

The Resolution 297/CP on Religions

 

On November 11, 1977, the Communist rule promulgated Resolution 297/ C P, instituting rules and regulations required of the religions to fulfill their obligations to the State. The law opens with a preamble that chants religious freedom. Inversely, the provisions that follow it prohibit and restrict religious freedom. It specifies that any one who takes advantage of religion to violate the independence of the Fatherland, to counteract against the socialist system, to decimate the solidarity of the people, to obstruct the religious followers from fulfilling their obligation of citizen, and to resist carrying out the policy and the law of the State will be punished by the law. The corollary of this politically tainted resolution thus gives itself its legal validity.

The resolution also postulates such obligations as "priests of any religion have to mobilize the followers to carry out the State's policy. They are required to obtain permission from the authority prior to any religious performance." Section 2B of this law vests the administration with more judiciary authority, to appropriate and to administer the churches, pagodas, temples, and other religious facilities for the administration's purposes. In principle, this enforcement of the law is only applied to abandoned worship places, the worship places where there are no guardians or resident priests, and the worship places that the followers no longer frequent to pay respect to, Buddha, saints, and geniuses.

Furthermore, the authorities, in any case, have full authority as vested by the law to adjust the regulations, and if they wish, to enforce the law to close down any church, pagoda, orphanage, school, and other religious institutions for some presumable purposes After April 30, 1975, these regulations were applied to all religions throughout South Vietnam. In all, the resolution prohibits without distinction the performances of religious services and the practices of superstitions. This resolution can also be a measure with which the administration uses to suppress the practices of certain traditional popular worships performances by adepts of Taoism and sorcery practitioners. Almost all of these prohibitions are reprised in the Decree on Religions 89 HDBT of March 21, 1991 (Hoang Xuan Hao. Vi Pham Nhan Quyen. Manuscript, 1993: 21).

In 1985, facing the failures in the economy due to financial foreign aids cuts by Communist European countries, Hanoi looked to Western democracies for economic investments and aids. To woo world religious and political leaders, it loosened its grip on the Churches, allowing a few religious institutes and seminaries to reopen to admit students to the priesthood. On the other hand, it furtively tightened control on them lest they would demand for more freedom. Exercising its monopoly of power, Hanoi nominated Buddhist monks and Catholic priests from State-affiliated associations to higher ranks and placed them in key positions in the clerical hierarchy while eliminating from the hierarchy those priests and monks it thought to be dangerous to its power. To consolidate its power within the Roman Catholic ecclesiastic hierarchy in Saigon, for example, it nominated Huynh Cong Minh of the state-affiliated Association for Patriotic Catholics the director of Saigon Seminary. It dismissed, at the same time, the veteran professors at this institution and replaced them with the priests from this State-run association. In their scheme, the Communists expected these docile priests one day would become high dignitaries of the Roman Catholic Church of Vietnam. Although they dominated the Catholic Church with strict measures as such, the Communists still feared that the seminarians, including those who were trained in the Marxist-Leninist discipline, might not become the .adherents to communism since other factors might affect their thinking and ways of life. The religious faith and ideals, even if distorted in one way or another, would ever create a factor.