The Vatican daily, L'Osservatore Romano, rejoiced last week at the ending of bloodshed in Indo-China. "Nevertheless, for Catholics," it added, "there remain grave and alarming fears for the future of their brethren in creed who now have passed under a regime inspired and guided by Communism."
These brethren are no mere scattering of missionary settlements. Among the Indo-Chinese in the area north of the 17th parallel which the French have ceded to Communist control (see FOREIGN NEWS) are at least a million and a half Roman Catholics.
Indo-China has a thousand-odd churches, some of them converted Buddhist temples (see cut). It is divided into 18 vicariates with about 1,400 native priests and 18 bishops (eight of them Indo-Chinese). Among them are Msgr. Pham Ngoc Chi, Bishop of Bui Chu and Msgr. Thaddeus Le Huu Tu, Bishop of Phat Diem. Msgr. Tu is the only Roman Catholic bishop in the world (besides the Pope, with his 100-odd Swiss Guards) to maintain his own private army—two regular battalions of 1,700 men, plus a militia of 5,800. (The two bishops and thousands of their flock were reported recently to have evacuated the area.)
The Roman Catholic Church in Indo-China is one of the oldest and most successful examples of Christian outreach in the Far East. Missionaries were established in Indo-China long before the French colonizers arrived. Among the most successful of these was 25-year-old Jesuit Alexandre de Rhodes of Avignon. A brilliant linguist, within six months Father de Rhodes began transforming the character writing of Vietnamese into a Romanized script. He rapidly built up a native clergy, which kept the church strong during periods of persecution under unfriendly monarchs.
One emperor ordered the foreheads of Christians tattooed with the words: "Perverted Religion," massacred 25,000 of them at Saigon, and martyred 22 missionaries with the "torture of 100 cuts." The truce forces on Indo-China's Catholics the hard choice of leaving their homes and churches to move south, or to stay and face the possibility of martyrdom at the hands of the Reds. Anti-Communist Vietnamese reported last week that Catholics in the north must already pay fees to attend Mass or wear crosses. A report from a Spanish Dominican priest at Namdinh was released by the Vatican. "Let us hope," he wrote, "that their faith will not fail before persecution."