What is Vietnam's game?
Diplomatic courtesies with the Vatican, but a hard line with the local Catholics.
Half a million Catholics march in peaceful processions to pray amid the ruins of churches
requisitioned by the government. Beaten and imprisoned, they have not given in.
ROME, July 31, 2009 – Vietnam is one of the very few countries in the world, together with Saudi Arabia and China, that do not have diplomatic relations with the Holy See.
It is also a country in which the Catholic community has a vivid recent memory of persecution, and continues to be mistreated. And yet it is almost certain that communist Vietnam will be one of the main stops on the trip to Asia that Benedict XVI intends to make in 2010.
The invitation to visit Vietnam was extended to the Pope by the archbishop of Dalat and president of the Vietnamese episcopal conference, Pierre Nguyen Van Nhon, during the 'ad limina' visit by the country's bishops at the end of June.
There has not yet been an official invitation from the government. But there is no doubt that this will come soon. Just before departing for Rome, the archbishop of Hanoi, Joseph Ngo Quang Kiet, received a 'suggestion' to invite the Pope from Hanoi's office for religious affairs. Kiet is secretary of the Vietnamese episcopal conference.
It is likely that the official invitation will be presented to Benedict XVI by the president of Vietnam, Nguyen Minh Triet, during his audience at the Vatican next December. This will be the second time one of the country's authorities has met with the Pope since reunification under communist rule in 1975. The previous visit was made on January 25, 2007, by prime minister Nguyen Tan Dung.
Next November, moreover, a delegation will go to Rome, created by the Vietnamese government in agreement with Vatican authorities, for the express purpose of discussing the establishment of diplomatic relations.
This will be the second round of talks between the two sides. The first round was held in Hanoi on February 16 and 17 of this year. The Vatican delegation was headed by Monsignor Pietro Parolin, Holy See undersecretary for relations with states.
The Vietnamese delegation was headed by the deputy minister for foreign affairs, Nguyen Quoc Cuong.
One key point of the discussions concerns the appointment of bishops. In Vietnam, the Holy See does not have full freedom to choose the new bishops. The current procedure is that Rome presents three candidates for each vacant diocese, and the Vietnamese authorities exclude the ones they don't want.
The latest batch of appointments – three bishops and one auxiliary – was made last July 25. One of the dioceses concerned, that of Phat Diem, had not had a bishop since April 14 of 2007: a sign of the difficulty in coming to an agreement.
Currently in Vietnam, none of the 26 dioceses is vacant. There are more than 6 million Catholics, 8 percent of the 84 million inhabitants. And they are growing: in Ho Chi Minh City alone, there were 9,000 adult baptisms last year.
Religious and monastic vocations are also increasing. There are now 270 monks in the country's four Benedictine monasteries. There were 11 in the Huê abbey in 1975, and today there are 79, with about twenty novices each year.
In addition to being religiously vibrant, the Vietnamese Catholic community is also increasingly active in the public sphere. In his address last June 27 to the bishops on their 'ad limina' visit, Benedict XVI dedicated a passage to relations with political authority, emphasizing that "religions do not represent a threat to the nation's unity," and on the contrary act "generously and impartially at the service of their neighbour."
But the idea that these words might be enough to reassure the authorities has been disproven by the events of recent weeks.
[Magister then posts a situationer about the plight of the Vietnamese Catholics, but AsiaNews has fresh updates today of government persecution of the Vietnamese Catholics. I will post these material in the CHURCH&VATICAN thread.]