Liverpool-born Archbishop Paul Richard Gallagher, the Vatican’s Secretary for Relations with States and International Organisations, is currently visiting Vietnam and staying as a guest of the government until Sunday in a bid to continue improving diplomatic ties between the Vatican and the Southeast Asian country.
Archbishop Gallagher has said little publicly about the purposes of his visit except that he hopes that the Vietnamese Catholic community will benefit from improved bilateral relations, alongside other significant diplomatic achievements.
The quiet re-establishment of the Church in Vietnam is one of the major successes of recent decades and many Vatican observers believe that a papal visit may soon be in the offing.
When most foreigners think of the history of Vietnam, the involvement of the Catholic Church does not register highly for many. Instead, the photos and images of helicopters atop buildings and desperate evacuations during the Fall of Saigon at the close of the Vietnam War – which had raged for two decades and cost 3.4 million lives, including more than 58,000 Americans and 500 Australians – usually serve as the most visually iconic moments of Western involvement (and failure) in the country.
The Communist victors went on to designate 30 April 1975 as the “Day of Liberating the South for National Reunification”. The Socialist Republic of Vietnam also became closed to the world for the next 15 years and only began to look slowly outwards after the dissipation of the Soviet Union at the end of the 1980s.
Since then, it has, like China, remained Communist while overseeing the gradual diversification into a free trade giant. Vietnam has gone on to sign 16 free trade agreements with 60 partners and last year its trade with the world reached US$730 billion, with its growth in national brand development the fastest on the planet. It is militarily neutral and focuses on making friends, having established diplomatic ties with nearly 200 countries, and has forged 33 strategic partnerships with other governments.
The latest beneficiary of this new outward-looking and welcoming attitude is the Catholic Church, whose diplomatic ties with Vietnam became inactive with the fall of Saigon.
A landmark moment came in July 2023 when Pope Francis signed the “Agreement on the Status of the Resident Papal Representative and the Office of the Resident Papal Representative of the Holy See in Vietnam”.
This was a major accomplishment for the Church because, although Vietnam is officially atheist and culturally Buddhist, more than six per cent of its 104 million population are Catholics and now, for the first time in half a century, they have someone who looks vaguely like a Papal Nuncio.
The man chosen by the Pope to be the Resident Papal Representative is Polish Archbishop Marek Zalewski, 60, who also serves as the Apostolic Nuncio to Singapore, and who for some years has been granted visiting rights by the Hanoi government. His appointment on December 23 raises the hope that soon bi-lateral relations will be fully normalised in due course. For now, the agreement makes Vietnam the only Communist country in south east Asia to have an unofficial Vatican representative on its soil, with China, Laos and North Korea yet to advance diplomatic relations to such an extent.
During his visit, Archbishop Paul Richard Gallagher will meet Foreign Affairs Minister Bui Thanh Son and Prime Minister Pham Minh Chính, have talks with officials at the Ministry of the Interior and celebrate Mass at St Joseph’s Cathedral in Hanoi. He will visit seminarians in the ecclesiastical province of Hue and celebrate Mass at Hue’s Phu Cam cathedral.
His visit is part of a new chapter in a long history of Christianity in Vietnam, stretching back to the 15th century when the first missionaries arrived, followed in the succeeding century by French, Polish and Portuguese members of the newly formed Society of Jesus.
The Church in Vietnam grew on soil soaked with the blood of martyrs. Persecution raged from 1723 to 1861 and although it was often sporadic, it is considered to be among the cruellest in history, with some of the 117 canonised martyrs – who included bishops, priests, religious and lay Catholics, both children and adults – suffering joint-by-joint amputations before finally their heads were chopped off.
This group of 96 Vietnamese, 11 Spanish Dominicans and 10 presbyters from the Paris Foreign Mission Society were all canonised together by Pope St John Paul II on 19 June 1988 and are commemorated on the feast of St Andrew Dung Lac and companions.
During the years of their persecution, Christians sought refuge in La Vang – meaning “to cry out” – following an apparition of the Blessed Virgin Mary there. Pope John Paul II acknowledged the importance of La Vang to Vietnam when he expressed a desire to rebuild the Catholic Church there.
The first step came in 1989 when French Cardinal Roger Etchegaray, then President of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, visited the country the year after Cardinal Nguyễn Văn Thuận of Saigon was sent into exile after 13 years in a “re-education camp” – nine of them in solitary confinement –following the Fall of Saigon.
It was not until 1990 that the Holy See was able to make the first diplomatic overtures to the authorities in Hanoi, but progress was slow because the government had long associated the Church with the anti-Communist south. Progress was slow and for the next decade or so they barely progressed beyond Vatican delegations making annual visits for meetings with its government authorities and to visit Catholic dioceses.
A major breakthrough came in 2007 when Prime Minister Nguyễn Tấn Dũng met Pope Benedict XVI at the Vatican in the first official visit to the Vatican by a Vietnamese head of government in more than 30 years.
In February 2009, the first meeting of the Vietnam-Holy See Joint Working Group was convened in Hanoi, and in December that year Pope Benedict held talks with President Nguyễn Minh Triết, hailed as “a significant stage in the progress of bilateral relations with Vietnam”.
The Vietnam–Holy See Joint Working Group met for a second time in June 2010 and little more than six months later, in January 2011, the Holy See appointed Singapore nuncio Archbishop Leopoldo Girelli as “non-resident representative to Vietnam”.
The policies of John Paul and Benedict were continued by Francis, who, 18 months after his election, held a meeting with Prime Minister Tấn Dũng in Rome. Francis received another high-level delegation from Hanoi in 2016.
What followed were rounds of discussions about the relationship between the Church and the state in Vietnam and how that might work in practice. Hanoi insisted on exercising a veto on any choice of cardinals for the country and stated its desire to be involved in the selection of bishop; in 2018 the Vatican agreed that archbishops would be appointed only after consultation with the government.
At the 10th session of the Vietnam-Holy See Joint Working Group last March in 2023, bilateral relations took a major step forward when it was decided that conditions were in place for the fuller resumption of diplomatic ties. On July 27, Vo Van Thuong, President of Vietnam, came to the Vatican to sign the agreement for a Resident Papal Representative.
Vatican Secretary of State Cardinal Pietro Parolin later explained that the agreement ensures “that the Pontifical Resident Representative has the conditions to exercise his ministry of legation with the local Church and Vietnamese Authorities, as well as to maintain relations with the Diplomatic Representations present in Vietnam”.
He described the Representative was a “bridge” whose purpose was to “further improve relations between Vietnam and the Holy See” and to strengthen “the friendly relations between the Holy See and the Government of Vietnam…to participate in the ordinary meetings of the Diplomatic Corps and receptions, as well as have personal meetings with the Diplomats.”
The Representative will undertake his work “in compliance with the law of the country and in the spirit of mutual trust and the good bilateral relations that have taken place until now,” Cardinal Parolin said, adding: “The future calls us to a path to continue on together, without the pretension or rush to reach some other goal, but with the willingness of those who want to confront each other to find the best.”
“The Agreement represents not just a finish line,” Cardinal Parolin concluded, “but a new beginning, under the sign of mutual respect and mutual trust.”
President Vo Van Thuong returned to Vietnam to visit the headquarters of the Bishops’ Conference in Ho Chi Minh City and participated for an hour and a half in “open and sincere” talks with nine bishops, including the conference president, Archbishop Joseph Nguyễn Năng of Ho Chi Minh City, along with five priests and two religious.
Then in September 2023, Pope Francis wrote a letter to the entire Catholic Church in Vietnam. The Pontiff called on the faithful to be “loyally committed to building a just, supportive, and fair society”, emphasising collaboration and dialogue. Citing Pope Benedict XVI, he said that the Church “wishes only to be able to play a just role in the nation’s life, at the service of the whole people, in a spirit of dialogue and respectful collaboration”.
“The Church in Vietnam, with the encouragement of each bishop and of the Vietnamese Bishops’ Conference, has proven to be a leaven in society, accompanying it in its development and contributing to its progress as faithful, responsible and credible believers,” wrote Pope Francis.
The Pope concluded the letter by imploring the intercession of Our Lady of La Vang, “the beloved patroness of Vietnam”.
His words apparently pleased the Vietnamese President who, during a visit the Archdiocese of Hue in December, announced that he had personally invited Pope Francis “to visit and see the social-economic developments and religious life in the country”.
Photo: Vatican Secretary for Relations with States Archbishop Paul Gallagher arrives to meet Vietnam’s Foreign Minister Bui Thanh Son at the Foreign Ministry, Hanoi, Vietnam, 9 April 2024. The Vatican’s de facto foreign minister arrived in Vietnam hoping to improve relations between the communist Southeast Asian nation and the Holy See, and potentially pave the way for a visit by Pope Francis. (Photo by NHAC NGUYEN/POOL/AFP via Getty Images.)
This page is available to subscribers. Click here to sign in or get access.
Areas of Catholic Herald business are still recovering post-pandemic.
However, we are reaching out to the Catholic community and readership, that has been so loyal to the Catholic Herald. Please join us on our 135 year mission by supporting us.
We are raising £250,000 to safeguard the Herald as a world-leading voice in Catholic journalism and teaching.
We have been a bold and influential voice in the church since 1888, standing up for traditional Catholic culture and values. Please consider donating.