The Rights to Religious Freedom
The Official Viewpoint
On December 31, 1993, the Permanent Mission of the
Socialist Republic of
The Reality
Inconsistencies in the provisions of the laws and
the enforcement practices of the laws
with persistent, inconsistent, harsh and measures of the authorities had led to
discontent or even unrest in various religious communities. There were voices
raising problematic issue by the Bishops of Vietnam in their petition to the government
in October 1993. The prelacy of the Roman Catholic Church of Vietnam requested
the government to allow all Catholic
priests and religious returning from
reeducation camps to resume their pastoral duties, that Catholic laity
be free to contribute to educational services the Church to
be free to maintain its own ministerial publications. And, although some
seminaries reopened, there were still more candidates than spaces. The Bishops
of Vietnam hoped that other closed seminaries would soon be reopened, and the
State to return to the Church the confiscated properties and the facilities of
various Catholic religious Orders. In conclusion, the Church's leadership
wished that " the basic conditions that are indispensable to the normal
functioning of a religion and that would allow the Catholic Church to serve the
country and the people effectively be the concerns of the government."
There were other issues that were of great concern
to the Church. The Bishops insisted that the plight of the nearly 55,000
refugees that still suffered misery in the refugee camps in Southern Asia. They
had been denied refugee status and had faced with forced repatriation They were
concerned as well with the unresolved problems affecting American
children, the continuing effects of Agent Orange, and other consequence left y
the destruction.
“We pray that, with the growing dialogue in these recent years and, nowadays, with the lifting of the economic sanctions,
greater tolerance and understanding will come, thus characterizing the relations between the two countries. We hope
in particular that the Vietnamese authorities will develop a more respectful
and tolerant approach toward the religious institutions of their country.
Religious liberty will ever an essential criterion for improving relations
between the United States and Vietnam. As the advocates of improved relations
between our two countries, we remain
committed to defending the rights and dignity of all believers in Vietnam.”
The Measures
In late March 1993, the Chairman of the State
Committee for Religions, Vu Quang, informed the Episcopal Conference in Saigon
of the government’s new policy concerning religious practices. There would be
solutions to the current religious issue. The government would be ready to
allow a number of Catholic priests to go and study religious subjects overseas.
Those priests who returned from reeducation would be allowed to resume their
priesthood unless their conduct proved to be appropriate. Seminaries that were legally
accredited by the government would be allowed to perform religious
functions. Nevertheless, Catholic
priests were still not be allowed to study abroad without authorization and
those priests who returned from reeducation were not permitted to perform their
religious services as pastors.
Other measures were executed. The state-affiliated
daily Saigon Giai Phong (Saigon Liberated), on August 17, 1975, reported that,
on August 15, 1975, at a meeting of the Catholic clergy in Saigon, Mai Chi Tho,
the then Vice-chairman of Saigon Military Management Committee, affirmed with
antipodal remarks that to nominate a bishop, for instance, is not only a
religious matter. Catholicism is essentially an incorporated component of the
Nation. Therefore, the appointment of a person to head a diocese must be
approved by the revolutionary administration. Following this line of politics,
in October 1993, the Ho Chi Minh City People's Council had pronounced its
protest against the Vatican's nomination of Bishop Huynh Van Nghi of Phan Thiet
diocese as the Coadjutor Administrator of Saigon Archdiocese. The Council also
announced that it would never bear to see Bishop Nguyen Van Thuan to become the
Archbishop of the Saigon prelacy, charging the Bishop with anti-revolutionary
crimes, a blood debtor to the people and the mastermind of national discord.
The protest, in reality, came out of preexisting decision. The Communist rule
wanted Archbishop Nguyen Van Binh to remain the unique supreme leader of the
Saigon Archdiocese. Its hostile attitude toward Bishop Nguyen Van Thuan might
result from political reason. The Bishop is a nephew of the late President of
the Republic of Vietnam Ngo Dinh Diem`, an old political adversary to the
Communist regime.
Artifices, in effect, were devised to blind public
opinion from the reality. On November 11, 1993, the State Catholic priest Huynh
Cong Minh, the pastor of the Archdiocese Cathedral of Saigon, informed without
an ecclesiastic order before the First Congress of the Ho Chi Minh City Committee
for Solidarity of Catholics that Archbishop Nguyen Van Binh had asked all
Catholic priests to withdraw from the said organization. The State priest even stressed
that “the participation of Catholic priests in the Committee as well as in
other political and social organizations are the responsibilities of the laity,
and not of the clergy. Political realities in the past had not allowed the
laity to assume this task. Therefore, the archbishop gave a number of priests
permission to temporarily be in charge of it. The situation has changed. The
country is in the process of renovation, and the economic, social, and political
activities have gone back to normalcy. The archbishop wanted all activities of
the laity to be normalized, and, thus, the clergy` will eventually be able to
assume the task that the laity cannot. Their task, now, is to perform religious duties, an area where
the religious personnel are in want.”
The declarations by the State priest were really
unconvincing. People knew very well the Committee of Union of Catholics led by
the “Gang of Four,” of which Hynh Cong Ninh is a member, was only an instrument
in the hands of the Communist Party. It was used as a means to an end in the monopoly
of power of the Communist Party. The political regime sought through its
activities to impose control on the Catholic Church. Nonparty members in it
only played a nominal role. Genuine
priests could only be exploited to the service of the regime. Being aware of
the anxiety of the Catholic clergy to a presence of certain true priests who
would involve in the activities of that State-created organization, Huynh Cong
Minh assumed the role of a State spokesman to maneuver the public. His
assertions came from the common tactics
usually applied by the Communist, "to move a step backward in order to
move two steps forward.
The control of the State on the Church fomented
indignation among Catholic circles and parishes. Leaflets denouncing violations
of religious freedoms by the Catholic Movement for Religious Freedom were found
at La Vang Cathedral in Quang Tri Province, Central Vietnam
(August 18, 1993) and in Long Thanh Catholic Community and the Ho Nai parishes
in Dong Nai Province in South Vietnam (September 5, 1993). Regarding the issue
of religious freedom, the Committee for the Struggle for Religious Freedom, in
its communication to the United Nations Committee on Human Rights in 1994, had
this to say:
"If there exist now 20 million believers, that
is one-third of the Vietnamese population, as the Permanent Mission of the
Socialist Republic of Vietnam to the United Nations reported, it is then
understood that 50 million of the Vietnamese population are atheistic. Supposing
that the aforementioned statistics were authentic, it reveals a desperate
tragedy: after 50 years under the Communist rule the Vietnamese Communist Party
and its administration have successfully transformed the traditionally
pietistic Vietnamese into atheists, with only one-third of them are now
religious believers. This fact alone reveals how crafty the so-called religious policy of the Vietnamese Communist
Party and State is.”
A Show of Power
The show of authority was apparent. For instance, the
civil authorities refused to grant authorization to three Vietnamese bishops to
go and attend the conference organized by the Federation of Conferences of
Bishops of Asia scheduled to be held in Manila, January 1995. They said that
they would not allow the bishops to attend the event because the Conference of
Bishops of Vietnam Reunified had not yet been a member of the federation (Much
Vu, October 1994). Vu Quang, Director of the Bureau of Religious Affairs, might
have explained to the bishops that it was the old Conference of Bishops of
South Vietnam that had been a member of the said organization. The new
Conference of Bishops Reunified was not a member in the federation. During the
process, twelve Bishops had requested in vain the Communist authorities to give
permission to come to Manila to participate in the event.
On October 7, 1994, Archbishop Etienne Nguyen Nhu
The, the Titular Archbishop of Tipasa in Maretania and Apostolic Administrator
of Hue Archdiocese, reported to the World Bishops Conference at the Vatican
that the religious life in Vietnam was suffering restrictions. The situation
gave rise to many problems, “particularly those concerning the formation of
priests, the lack of means for the reconstruction of diocesan premises, and the
shortage of ministerial personnel. Congregations that are devoted to religious
education and charitable activities cannot pursue their missions in accordance
with their own charisma because of the State monopoly of power in the areas of
religious and humanitarian services. Thus, despite some relaxation in 1986, the
Catholic Church of Vietnam had not had
significant freedom. As a matter of fact, “the household registration
system restricts freedom of movement and residence status caused difficulties
for the clergy to perform ministerial duties and religious services and
religious organization and to operate religious activities even within
religious communities. Meetings for religious services, in principle, are not
subject to authorization. Nevertheless,
authorization prior to any form of assembly is required.”
State oppression ever persisted. On October 1, 1995,
the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, again, sent a letter to Prime
Minister Vo Van Kiet reminding him of the difficulties that it had met as a
result of the application of the State’s hostile politics of the government on
the religion. The prime minister had
already given promises and granted solutions to the problems the Church had
presented in its previous requests, namely, the ban on restrictions on movement
of the priests and bishops to perform pastoral duties. the creation of a
seminary at Hue, and the considerations of the proposal from the Episcopal Conference on
processing procedures for admission of
prospective seminarians to seminaries. Most problems concerned remained
unsolved, thus causing the pastoral duties of the clergy as well as the
religious life of the faithful more difficult.
It took off much of the Church's utmost persuasive fervor due to the
hostile politics on religions of the government.
The Conference of Bishops of
Vietnam for many years had wished to be allowed to own and operate a house of
editions to print and diffuse diverse religious materials. Nevertheless, their
requests for authorization had never been accorded. Surprisingly, the
Directives 379/TTG, issued on July 23, 1993 decreed, among other regulations,
that "the authorization for printing religious books must be given in
conformity with the law on publications, as foreseen in Article 18, and
"the organs of administration of the State with competence in the matter
of publication will determine concretely [the legal
procedures for the creation of] the houses of editions that take charge of publishing most books of prayers and religious works
conveniently.” (EDA 291)
As always, the Vietnamese Communist Party turned
kept a close watch on ideological deviations of the organizations orbiting
within its system. The religious circles are of particular concern. The review
“Catholicism and the Nation,” which is an propagation organ of the State-sponsored Committee of
Union of Catholics, in its issue of June-July 1997, was called into order by
the Committee of Ideology and Culture of
the Communist Party Section of Ho
Chi Minh City. In its letter addressed to the editorial staff, the Party
authority blamed the review for forming erroneous judgments on history and
historical personages as they did not chime with the official appreciation of
the Communist Party. For instance, the
Reverend Truong Ba Can, the editor-in-chief and a regime’s “protégé,” was blamed for his devious judgments on Stalin and his
regime. Indeed, In his article in the monthly supplement, the politician-priest
described Stalin as a leader who had acquired numerous merits but who at the
same time had committed numerous unforgivable errors and mistakes. The
commentator further proliferated that under Stalin’s leadership, the Soviet regime became
“sanguinary and cruel.” The two adjectives “sanguinary and cruel,” the
authorities stressed, did not depict in any way the true picture of the
political regime even if, during a certain period under his leadership, Stalin
carried an erroneous politics. “Sanguinary and cruel” were only appropriate for
the description of a capitalist regime or the fascist regime of Hitler. By
giving improper judgments of value on Stalin and his regime, the review
involuntarily incited animosity towards socialism among those who tried to
discredit the “Revolution.”
The editor was also blamed for infringement on the
unwritten orientation rules and regulations according to which opinions and
viewpoints that did not reflect the
Party’s lines of politics are likely deemed
to be deviations. The warning was equally addressed to the author of an article
published in the same issue. The article appeared in a form of a prayer of a
priest who repented his sin and asked for redemption on Ash - Wednesday..
expressing excruciating grief: “Lord, We Have Caused Misfortune to the
Generation to come.” The author evoked in veiled terms the misconduct in
matters of abuse of power of a dogmatic State education agency. Weaknesses of
similar type reflected the worries of the population about the penury of intellectuals, the increase in evils,
the practices of commercialization of the instruction, and the quantitative
insufficiency and qualitative incompetence of the teachers as well.
To justify their remarks, the authorities redirected
public opinion to the Party’s orientation. Everyone must constrain himself to
the study and practice of socialist ideals as well as the contents and methods
that are prescribed by the Party’s political lines in the domain of education.
To elevate that spirit, after having recommended the teachers to fight against
the actual degradation of ideology education and the expansion of religious
propaganda to poison the school environment, thus genuinely strengthening
civic, ideological, and moral education, and the practice of Marxism-Leninism..
Control of thought was persistent and pervasive
throughout a long period. The rights to information of the Church was limited
within the places of worship. In April 2000, in an interview accorded to the
review “Catholicism and the Nation,” the
press organ of the Committee of Union of Catholics in Ho Chi Minh City, Pham
Ngoc Chau affirmed the exact date of the creation of a Printing House for
Religious Editions. The State cadre even enumerated the objectives of the
printing house and specified the character of two categories of publication of
different forms, one for the books with religious contents, books of prayers
and the other for books for religious teaching. In the latter category, there
were two sub-categories, one for the publication of books of religions
published by the religion and the other for the books on religions published by
the Communist Party of Vietnam and the State. (EDA 309)
The review “Catholicism and the Nation” cited as proof, a number of works had already
appeared in this house of editions such as the ones administered by the Bishop
of Long Xuyen Bui Tuan and Father Ngo Duc Hau, the editor of the “Journal of
Jesus.” According to Pham Ngoc Chau,
during the interview in April 2000, the House of Editions would have published
120 book titles belonging to the first category. Many Catholic and other
religious works might have been published in the year 2000, among which were
the Buddhist Scriptures (Holy Writings), the Old Testament, the New Testament,
the “K'oran” as well as the prophetic writings of the Founder of Hoa Hao
Buddhism Huynh Phu So (EDA 269).
Restrictions on diffusion of information and
communication between the Church and faithful became even stricter. The
Catholic review Hiep Thong (Communion) was suspended at the command of the Bureau of Religious
Affairs and the secretary of the Episcopal Conference. The review might survive
if it changed its subjects and form, although the notice from the authorities
indicated clear decision on the matter.
Along with the suspension of “Hiep Thong,” the Roman
Catholic Church of Vietnam ceased to have its official voice. The
Party-affiliated review “Cong Giao va Dan Toc” (Catholicism and the Nation)
seemingly played the role of an semiofficial organ of information and
apparently assumed the role of “spokesman” of the Church. To make it clear
about the nominal role of the review to public opinion, the Reverend Chan Tin,
an advocate for human rights and religious freedom. declared his protest
against the decision by the International Catholic Union Press (UCIP) to recommend the “Catholicism and Nation” with a
gold medal during a congress held at Fribourg, September 17-23,
2001, which honor it did not deserve.
In his letter to the UCIP on October 12, 2001, the Reverend Chan Tin stressed that “the organization has made a serious
error, due to lack of adequate information on the role that the review “Cong
Giao va Dan Toc” and the Committee of Union of Catholics. They only play a nominal role of demagogues
within in the political context created by the Vietnamese Communist Party. The
award only evokes an outrage and deepen a wound inflicted on the honor of the
whole Vietnamese Catholic community and, especially, those who have suffered
injustice, imprisonment ,and residence
surveillance, or are resigned to live
in forced silence for their struggle for freedoms of speech, of the press and
of religious freedom in Vietnam.”
The review, in effect, had been created in Paris
before the end of the Vietnam War. Its office was later installed in Saigon
after the war and became the press organ of the Committee of Union of Patriotic
Catholics, the precursor of the Union of Catholics. The latter association then
became a member of the Fatherland Front. Its function was, according to the
terms used in its charter, was in charge of mobilizing the Catholics to engage
in carrying out important objectives of the Communist Party and State. The
authorized Catholic publication is not
the least representative of the entirety of the Catholic faithful of Vietnam.
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