ABSTRACT
The longevity of the Vietnamese Communist Party (VCP) might suggest that it stands atop a political structure that is immune to domestic and international challenges to its stability and legitimacy. Beyond its ability to withstand foreign political and military intervention, the VCP manages to regulate tightly from above most would-be civil society groups. Yet the Vietnamese Catholic Church has often proved that it has the ability to resist the vertically structured, assimilating pressures of the party-state. In doing so, it has built on its historical presence and spread out horizontally through society, thereby creating a space for social and political freedom. While the Vietnamese state attempts to co-opt the Church, unlike its post-Cold War communist counterparts it has also demonstrated a willingness to tolerate many of the Church’s activities. This chapter will examine the relationship between Church and state in Vietnam since the country’s unification in 1975. It adds a religious dimension to the “straddlers” discussed in this volume, and it complements Joseph Hannah’s chapter above on Vietnamese NGOs. What will come to light in this chapter are the differing ways in which the state tries to rein the Church in as well as how the Church has remained, to an extent, outside the purview of the state. We will see that while Church-state relations in Vietnam can at times be contentious, they exhibit a surprising degree of harmony because of the Church’s ability to straddle the social, religious, and political divides between itself and the secular authorities. Its ability to do so and to resist cooptation – such that it constitutes one of the least statist of the hybrid organizations considered in this book – comes from both the strength and the flexibility that the Church’s vertical structure affords. From the Pope in Vatican City, to the Vietnamese bishops, to the activities of priests in local communities, the Vietnamese state faces a religious institution on three different levels: international, national, and local. An examination of the Church’s presence on these three levels will reveal how it has been able to maneuver within the communist system by utilizing different approaches when responding to state initiatives. The Church’s resistance to the state has been facilitated by the varying practices within the state’s structure. For example, policies mandated by the Vietnamese National Assembly are often left to interpretation and implementation by the provincial governments, which interact with the Church in differing ways. When envisioning Church-state relations in
Vietnam, we may imagine a symbolic cross of sorts. Despite the efforts of many provincial party officials, the Church’s horizontal reach through Vietnamese society is crossed, and thus conditioned, by the hierarchical structures of both the Church and the state. Thus, we will see that the Church, commonly viewed as a hierarchically rigid organization, is instead more flexible than one would expect and that a communist, seemingly monolithic, state is willing to accommodate and even benefit from this historical rival.
