Catholic Vietnam: A Church from Empire to Nation, by Charles Keith, is a well-written and brilliantly researched investigation into the history of the church in colonial Vietnam. By exploring the trajectory of the church-congregant relationship, Keith provides a narrative that is significant not only for the colonial period, but for understanding the politics of early years of independence that led up to the U.S.-Vietnam War. In his analysis of the colonial period, Keith argues that while the French missionary-run church certainly affected inequalities that correlated with race, congregants and indigenous priests nonetheless maintained their faith in part because they developed ties to global Catholic community. After World War I, when Vatican reforms allowed for a national church to develop, Vietnamese Catholics came to envision themselves as part of a Vietnamese national, as well as a global, Catholic community. Consequently, Vietnam's Catholics began to reconsider their relationship with missionaries and colonialism, leaving the church in Vietnam deeply divided.

The forte of Catholic Vietnam is its methodology. The author draws from a vast empirical base of Vietnamese and French language sources including church archives in the Vatican; the League of Human Rights archives, the Société de Saint Sulpice archives, and the Foreign Missions archives in France; state archives in Vietnam and France; as well as an array of published sources, including Vietnamese- and French-language church bulletins and newspapers. As a result, Catholic Vietnam thoroughly explores the complexities of the colonial Catholic community, its multitude of voices, and the ways in which congregants understood their place as French colonized people in a global Catholic Church. In doing so, this book re-centers the historiographical discussion of the Vietnamese Catholic Church to focus on Vietnamese congregants and the development of a Vietnamese Church.

The chapters of Catholic Vietnam are organized chronologically. Keith begins in the late eighteenth century by tracing the development of missionary activity and church life as France established colonial rule in the late nineteenth century. The first chapter—one of the most interesting in the book—reconstructs the village life of Catholic congregants. As a cultural history of the nineteenth century, this chapter is part of a recent refreshing turn in Vietnamese historiography to revisit the Nguyen Century, including recent works by Nguyen Van Marshall, Bradly Davis, and Katie Dyt.

Chapter 2 explores how metropolitan debates over the separation of church and state played out in the early years of French colonization, when anticolonial rebels fought the colonial state. Keith found that within the context of this friction between the Catholic Church and the Republican-led colonial administration, the influence of European religious authorities over Catholic life grew repressive. In the 1920s, chapter 3 shows, the Vatican enacted new policies that, among other things, solve this problem as well as that of the decline European religiosity. This chapter demonstrates how those changes made by the Vatican put the Vietnamese Church on the road towards forming an independent national church. In chapter 4, Keith argues that the rise in print culture further bolstered the development of a specifically Vietnamese Catholic identity. By making discussions in the domestic and international Catholic communities available to literate congregants, Vietnamese Catholics came to see themselves as part of “an international religious community that was at once national and global” (117). Chapter 5 follows the logical progression in which Vietnaemse Catholics began to see themselves within ever-larger communities. New economic structures and colonial economies led Vietnamese villagers to cities, to other areas of the colony, to different countries in Asia, and even to the metropole. The effect linked Vietnamese Catholics with global Catholicism. Catholic youth associations developed, parishoners made pilgramages to the holy site at La Vang, and locals celebrated international festivals. Chapter 6 focuses on the different ways that Catholics came to see themselves in the developing national community in the midst of Buddhist revival and the rise of anticolonialism and communism.

The final chapter discusses the delicate position of Catholics during the Indochina War when many opposed the return to French colonial rule while facing a hostile revolutionary government. This chapter has important implications for the historiography of twentieth-century Vietnamese history, as it lays the foundation for understanding how Catholics came to dominate south Vietnam's political scene in the early years after independence. This history of the nationalization of the church during the colonial period offers the context for the political ascent of the infamous Catholic Ngo family, from which came Ngo Dinh Diem, the president (1954–1963) of the Republic of Vietnam in the south. As Keith shows as early as the turn of the century, the Catholic patriarch Ngo Dinh Kha was a staunch nationalist and had a reputation as a fierce defender of the Vietnamese monarchy. In the late 1930s, Ngo Dinh Thuc, older brother to the future president, delivered a highly controversial nationalist-themed speech upon his ordination as Bishop. Future president Ngo Dinh Diem and his brother and political advisor Ngo Dinh Nhu, who had established their nationalist credentials in the 1930s, would eventually lead a repressive state that privileged Catholics in the South Vietnam. This preference for Catholics at the expense of others was among the Ngo brothers’ many infractions that turned south Vietnamese public opinion against them and led to their early demise.

Catholic Vietnam is a superb analysis of church history in Vietnam. This book is an important contribution to the study of Vietnamese history and French colonialism for both content and methodology. Keith reminds historians to embrace the complexities of history, as his meticulous research carefully follows the multitudes of discourses developing within the Catholic Church and untangles the complicated history of Catholic Vietnam. The author's clear writing style will appeal to both undergraduate and graduate students of Southeast Asian history, Vietnamese studies, history of imperialism, French history, and church history.