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Chapter 15 End of the Catholic Dictatorship

To the Vatican, Vietnam was another exercise for the planting of Catholic authoritarianism in an alien land against the wishes of the majority of the population. The Vatican is a master at using political and military opportunities to further its own religious policies, which ultimately means the expansion of the Catholic Church which it represents. To promote such policies, as a rule she will use individuals who are genuinely religious to further her religious and political operations.

The case of Diem is a classic example. The Vatican supported Diem, because he was a genuine Catholic, the U.S. supported him because he was a genuine anti-communist. At this time, since the policy of the Catholic Church was totally anti-communist, it followed that a genuine Catholic would follow his Church and be as genuinely anticommunist as she was.

To the U.S. Secretary of State and to the Vatican, therefore, the religious genuineness and asceticism of Diem was the surest guarantee that Diem would execute their joint policy with the utmost fidelity, and in this they were right, as subsequent events demonstrated. People who knew better, however, were not of the same opinion about Diem’s suitability. The American Embassy, for instance, advised against him from the very beginning. The embassy’s warning was completely ignored by Washington, and although the State Department itself was against the choice, the Special Operations Branch of the Pentagon insisted on Diem. It had its way. What was the explanation? A certain clique at the Pentagon inspired by another in the CIA with intimate links to the Catholic lobby in Washington and certain cardinals in the U.S. and consequently in perfect accord with the Vatican, had decided to have a staunch Catholic in South Vietnam.

It must be remembered that this was the period when the Cold War was at its worst. Its arch-exponents, the Dulles brothers – one at the State Department and the other at the CIA – and Pius XII at the Vatican, were conducting a joint diplomatic, political and ideological grand strategy embracing both the West and the Far East of which Vietnam was an integral part.

The choice proved a disaster for South Vietnam and for the U.S. Asian policy. As we have just seen, the religious issue was eventually to stultify the whole grand American strategic pattern there.

Two Catholic presidents, Diem and Kennedy, had become the heads of two nations so intimately involved in a most controversial war. From the Vatican’s point of view and the promotion of its plans in Asia were concerned, this had unlimited possibilities. In different circumstances, the sharing of common religious beliefs might have helped in the conduct of a common policy, since the political interests ofthe two countries ran parallel.

With Catholic Diem pursuing such anachronistic religious persecutions, however, Catholic Kennedy felt increasingly ill at ease, since he was too astute a politician to compromise his political career or to sacrifice the interests of the U.S. for the sake of a fellow Catholic who, after all, was incurring the opprobrium of the vast majority of Americans, most of whom still looked upon Kennedy’s Catholicism with suspicion. Hence the Kennedy Administration’s blessing upon the final overthrow of the Diem regime. But it is often the case with Catholics in authority that whenever the circumstances permit and there is no restriction by either constitutional clauses or other checks, they tend to conduct policy more and more consonant with the spirit of their religion. The result being that, by combining the interests of their country with those of their Church, more often than not, they create unnecessary social and political fields.

When this state of affairs is nearing a crisis, owing to the resistance of the non-Catholic opposition, then the Catholics exerting political or military power will not hesitate to use that power against those who oppose them. At this stage, the interests of their Church will, as a rule, oust those of their country.

This formula proved to be correct in the case of South Vietnam. President Diem, having provoked such a crisis, disregarded the interests of the country, no less than those of its protectors, the U.S., to pursue what he considered were the interests of his church.

Whereas political and military factors of no mean import played a leading part in the ultimate tragedy, it was the religious factor which obscured the political and military vision of President Diem, and led him to disaster. Only twenty years before, in Europe, another Catholic, Ante Pavelich, had created the Catholic state of Croatia in which the Catholic Church ruled supreme to the exclusion of any other religion. Like Diem, Pavelich had justified Catholic totalitarianism on the ground that a Catholic dictatorship was the best defense against communism. According to such a concept that entitled him to launch not only the persecution of anyone or of anything who was not Catholic, in his case the Orthodox Church, but also the extermination of more than 600,000 men, women and children – one of the most horrific deeds of World War II.

In Asia, the situation being diverse and the political and military backgrounds being supervised by a mighty power, the U.S., such excesses were not permitted. Yet the preliminaries of religious persecution and concentration camps were indicative of what might have happened had not world opinion and the restrictive influence of the U.S. not intervened. The religious and political ambitions of the two Catholic dictators and their relationship with the Catholic Church, however, run parallel. Thus, whereas the political and military machinery controlled by South Vietnamese and Croatian dictators was put at the disposal of the Catholic Church, the Catholic Church put her spiritual and ecclesiastical machinery at the disposal of the two dictators who made everyone and everything subordinate to her religious and political totalitarianism.

Both Diem and Pavelich had pursued three objectives simultaneously: 1) the annihilation of a political enemy, i.e. communism; 2) the justification for the annihilation of an enemy church, i.e. the Orthodox Church in the case of Pavelich and Buddhism in the case of Diem; 3) the installation of Catholic religious and political tyranny in each country.

Notwithstanding the different circumstances and geographical and cultural backgrounds, the pattern of the two regimes was exactly the same: anything and anyone not conforming or submitting to Catholicism was to be ruthlessly destroyed via arrest, persecution, concentration camps and executions. With the result that by relegating the interest of their country to the background, so as to further the interests of their religion, both dictators finally brought their lands into the abyss.

In the case of President Diem, when he put Catholicism first, he alienated not only the vast majority of South Vietnamese masses, but even more dangerous the greatest bulk of the South Vietnamese army, who on the whole had supported him politically. It was this, the potential and factual endangering of the anti-communist front upon which Diem’s policy had stood, that finally set into motion the U.S. military intervention, with all the disastrous results which were to follow.

Although Diem remained as the U.S. political protege, by pursuing a policy inspired by his own personal religious zeal, and by disregarding certain diplomatic and political interests interconnected with the general military strategy of the U.S., he had endangered a whole policy in Southeast Asia. This became even more obvious, not only because of the exceptional restlessness which he provoked throughout the country, but above all, because his religious persecutions had seriously imperiled the effectiveness of the army.

It must be remembered that the vast majority of the South Vietnamese troops were made up of Buddhists. Many of these, upon seeing their religion persecuted, their monks arrested, their relatives in camps, had become despondent, and indeed, mutinous. There were increasing cases of absenteeism, desertions, and even rebellions. The overall result of this was not so much that the religious war was incapacitating the Diem’s regime itself, but even worse, that the military calculations of the U.S. were being seriously imperiled.

The whole issue, at this juncture, had become even more tragic, because in the meantime the U.S., had elected her first Catholic president, and even more so, because on the personal level, Kennedy himself, before reaching the White House, had been a consistent supporter of Catholic Diem. Indeed he had been one of the most influential members of the Catholic lobby which had steered the U.S. towards the Vietnam War.

As the domestic and military situation inside South Vietnam went from bad to worse, the manipulators of Southeast Asia made it clear to him with the full support of the military authorities on the spot that something drastic had to be done to prevent the total disintegration of the South Vietnamese army. The mounting tension with Soviet Russia and Red China made a move from Washington imperative and urgent, since further internal and military deterioration might provoke the whole of the anti-communist front to collapse from inside.

The pressure became irresistible and the first ominous steps were taken. Subsidies to the Vietnam Special Forces were suspended. Secret directives were given to various branches closely connected with the inner links between the V.S. and the Diem regime. Finally, on October 4th, 1963, John Richardson, the head of the CIA in Vietnam was abruptly dismissed and recalled to Washington. Certain individuals understood that they were given a free hand for a coup against Diem.

A coup was successfully engineered, President Diem ~d his brother, the hated head of the secret police had to run for their lives. They were discovered by rebel troops hiding in a small Catholic Church. Having been arrested, they were placed in a motor vehicle as state prisoners. Upon arrival at their destination – both Diem and his brother had been shot to death. Their bodies were laid at St. Joseph’s Hospital only a few hundred yards away from the Xa Pagoda, the center of the Buddhist resistance to the Diem denominational persecution.

Twenty days after the assassination of Diem, the first Catholic president of South Vietnam, the first Catholic president of the V.S., John F. Kennedy, was himself assassinated in Dallas, Texas. Why, and by whom has remained a secret ever since.

After the collapse of President Diem’s dictatorship, the V.S. involvement in the war of Vietnam was to last another ten long years, from 1963 to 1973.

On April, 1975, Saigon the capital of South Vietnam fell to the communists. The following year on June 24, 1976, the first session of the Vietnamese National Assembly opened in Hanoi in the North. On July 2, 1976, North and South declared themselves reunited, thus ending 20 years of separation. Their new flag, a five pointed yellow star on a red background, became the symbol of the new nation, the Socialist Republic of Vietnam.

It had cost the Vietnamese people hundreds of thousands of wounded and dead, the devastation of their country and immense human misery. It had cost the U.S. billions and billions of dollars, domestic and external bitterness, the participation of more than 5.5 million American men with the loss of more than 58,000 young American lives.

It could be that the war in Vietnam was bound to come, regardless of the intrigues of organized religion. Yet it could be also that, had not the Catholic Church interfered so actively in the affairs of that country, the war in Vietnam might never have happened.

[Chapter 16 title=”Catholic Expansionism in Southeast Asia in the 19th Century”]

The tenacious political activism of the Catholic Church during Diem’s rule and the massive military defeat suffered by the U.S. can best be comprehended by studying the Catholic Church’s actions prior to the conflict. They were both determined to defeat an aggressive brand of Asian communism, yet they had diametrically opposite reasons for intervening.

To the U.S., Vietnam became a military conflict, part of a policy focused on the two Euro-Asian centers of global communism: Peking with one thousand million Chinese only recently regimented into Marxism by Mao Tze Tung, and Moscow, the Mecca of Western Bolshevism.

To the Catholic Church, however, Vietnam was more than a mere stepping stone in America’s fight against world communism. Vietnam had long been “hers, by right.” Because of this, Vietnam had to be “rescued” from the impending ideological chaos and military anarchy which followed France’s evacuation after World War II.

But even more important to her as a religious entity, was the rescue of Vietnam from Buddhism with which the Catholic Church had fought for hundreds of years. This motivation, although never mentioned in any circles during the Vietnamese conflict, nevertheless had become one of the major factors that influenced the general conduct of the Catholic Church in her relationship with Vietnam, before, during, and after President Diem’s regime. The failure to recognize this factor became one of the major causes of the ultimate political and military disintegration of Vietnam and therefore of the final collapse of the U.S. military effort itself.

It might be asked how the Catholic Church could enlist the aid of Protestant U.S. and intervene with such active political pressure in Buddhist impregnated Vietnam where the racial, cultural, and religious background made her and the U.S. both alien powers. Her claims were based upon the proposition that she had had a very “special” relationship with Vietnam. Strictly speaking, that was true.

Diem, as already seen, was from the typical Catholic Vietnamese culture, a by-product of this special relationship. Patrician by birth, Catholic by tradition, he belonged to a special elite which had greatly influenced the destiny of Vietnam for centuries. The riddle of his behavior could be explained by the fact that all his activities were motivated basically by his religious convictions.

He was a stubborn, dogmatic believer persuaded that he had a mission. This quality brought his ultimate ruination, and the U.S. into the Vietnamese War. He had convinced himself that tl1e policy of repression which he so stubbornly pursued was his duty as a traditionally Vietnamese Catholic. providence had positioned him to promote the interests of the Catholic Church, as his ancestors had done before him in the past.

What were the factors which helped to create such dedicated Catholic individuals in Vietnam? Historically the Catholic Church was the first Christian Church to operate in the Indo-Chinese peninsula as far back as three hundred or so years ago. Vietnam was the spearhead of her penetration from the very beginning of the sixteenth century, when her stations were manned chiefly by Spanish and Portuguese missionaries.

Religious settlements were followed by commercial ones. In due course, other European nations such as England, the Netherlands and France started to compete for the attention of the native populations.

The most vigorous introducers of Western enlightenment, which in those days meant Christianity, were the Jesuits, then in the prime of their exploratory zeal. The Franciscans, Dominicans, and others, although prominent, never exerted the influence of the Jesuits who were determined to plant the spiritual and cultural power of the Church in Southeast Asia. Having arrived there about 1627, they spread their activities practically in all fields. They attempted with varied success to influence the cultural and political top echelons of society, unlike the other missionaries who contented themselves exclusively with making converts. Their efforts were helped by the printing of the first Bible in 1651, and the growing influence of several individuals, men of sophistication, who were welcomed in certain powerful circles.

The result was that in due course, owing to political intrigues and commercial rivalries, the European influence declined. The Catholic Church increased in reverse proportion however, and during the following century came to dominate the ruling elite, thanks chiefly to the liberality of certain native potentates, beginning with the Emperor Gia- Long. In fact, it was mainly thanks to his protection that the Catholic Church was soon granted privileges of all kinds which she used vigorously to expand her influence.

Like in so many other instances however, the privileges very quickly gave way to abuse. In no time the Catholic communities came to exercise such a disproportionate religious and cultural domination, that reaction became inev· itable throughout the land. The reaction turned into ostracism, and eventually into veritable persecution of anything European which, more often than not, meant anything Catholic.

The Catholic communities reacted in turn. From passive opposition they became actively belligerent. Ultimately revolts were organized practically all over Cochin-China. The disorders were inspired and very often directed by the Catholic missionaries, supported by French national and commercial interests. The continuous inroad of Roman Catholicism, the spearhead of the European culture and colonial incursion into the land, in the long run inspired the hostility of the Emperor Theiu Tri, who ruled between 1841 and 1847. By this time the French intrigues with the Catholic missionaries had become so intermingled that the two ultimately became almost identical. The Catholic missions were boycotted, restrictive legislation was enforced, and Catholic activities were banned everywhere.

The reaction in Europe was immediate cries of religious persecution. This was typical of the European Imperialism of the period. In 1843, 1845, and 1847, French war vessels stormed Vietnamese ports, with the pretext of requesting the release of the missionaries. As a reply the Vietnamese rulers intensified their objections to European ecclesiastical and commercial intervention in their country. This strong Vietnamese resistance gave France and Spain further pretext to intervene.

In 1858 a Franco-Spanish force invaded Darnang. Saigon was occupied in February 1859, followed by the adjacent three provinces. In June 1862, a treaty was imposed upon Vietnam. The treaty confirmed the French conquest and gave the provinces to France. One of its clauses provided the Catholic Church with total religions freedom.

Within a few years, France had occupied almost the whole country. Hanoi, in the North, was taken in 1873. In August 1873, the final “treaty” was signed. The Vietnamese independence had come to an end. The whole of Indo- China: Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, had become French colonies. The conquest had been pioneered and made possible chiefly by the activities of the Roman Catholic missionaries, and the Catholic Church which had first sent them there.

This was proved soon afterwards when Catholic missionaries were given special privileges throughout the new Vietnamese regions. The missionaries had not only supreme power in religious and cultural matters, but equally in social, economic and political ones. And since the power of the French military and civil authorities were always behind them, they never hesitated to use the French bayonets to impose the cross upon the reluctant natives.

Friars, Jesuits, priests, nuns, bishops and French military and civil governors set to work to implant Catholicism throughout Vietnam. The original native Catholics were regrouped into special villages. Intensive, mass conversion to Catholicism was undertaken everywhere. Whole villages were persuaded to “see the light” either because the conversion brought food and assistance of the missionaries, or because money, position or privileges in the educational or colonial echelons were beyond the reach of anyone who refused.

Such inducements, more often than not, became irresistible to those who were ambitious, restless or did not care for the traditions of their fathers. The temptation was great since only those converted were allowed to attend school, or had a chance to undertake higher education. Official positions in local and provincial administrations were given exclusively to Catholics, while the ownership of land was permitted only to those who accepted the’ Catholic faith. During recurrent famines, thousands of starving peasants were induced to receive baptism, either in family groups or even entire villages, prior to being given victuals from the Catholic missions.

The methodical Romanizing of Vietnam was promoted not only by the machinery of the Church, it was enforced by an increasingly repressive French colonial legislation inspired behind the scenes mostly by the missionaries themselves. As a result of such intensified religious colonial double pressure, in no time the French colonial administration had been transformed into a ruthless conversion tool of the Catholic Church, over the mounting protests of the liberal religious and political sections of metropolitan France.

After more than half a century of this massive ecclesiastical and cultural colonization, the native and French Catholics practically monopolized the entire civil and military administration. From there sprang a Catholic elite stubbornly committed to the Catholicization of the whole country. This elite passed the torch of the Church from generation to generation down to President Diem and his brothers. Their actions were true to their ancient traditions.

It cost them their lives, the disestablishment of the whole of Vietnam, and finally the military intervention of the U.S., with all the horrors before and after her ultimate humiliation and defeat.