Spanish, Portugese and French missionaries converted up to 100,000 Vietnamese to the Catholic faith during the seventeenth century, a remarkable explosion of interest in a new credo which adherents managed to convey to descendants despite opposition from the royal government that sometimes extended to torture and execution. Conversions dropped off during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, surged upward again during French colonisation, and then stabilised at 10–12 per cent of the total Vietnamese population by the 1920s.

Most Vietnamese were quite convinced that the French government and the Catholic Church connived to advance the colonial project in Indochina. Catholic Vietnam, on the contrary, demonstrates in convincing detail that civil and ecclesiastical authorities retained separate agendas, suspected one another, and sometimes engaged in open disputation. Catholics did assist French forces in quelling Vietnamese anti-colonialists, and the Church appropriated large landholdings, but Republican French officials then worked to circumscribe missionary powers, especially in local administration and education. Meanwhile, missionaries criticised colonial monopolies, prisons and the defence of heathen religious practices. Catholic villagers occasionally threw rocks at colonial tax collectors. None the less, Keith concludes that ‘many missionaries and some Vietnamese Catholics continued to consider France a saviour throughout the colonial era’ (p. 68).

Catholic Vietnam is most enlightening on the internal history of the Church between the 1870s and 1940. From sixty-eight Société des Missions Etrangères de Paris (MEP) missionaries in Vietnam in 1868, numbers grew to nearly four hundred a generation later. Churches multiplied from 906 in 1875 to 1,578 in 1933. The presence of so many new missionaries limited the role of the local clergy. Missionaries often stopped living communally with native priests, and there were embarrassing cases of missionaries smoking opium, embezzling funds or breaking their vows of chastity. On average, a missionary cost the Church fifteen times as much money to support as a local priest.

In 1919 Pope Benedict xv expressed reservations about ties between missionaries and colonial regimes, and determined that the only way to develop the Church outside Europe was to expand the ranks and roles of the local clergy. Seven years later Pope Pius xii foresaw great harm to the Church if inhabitants drove out both colonial authorities and missionaries when the native clergy was poorly equipped to carry on. By 1945 in Vietnam there were six local priests for each missionary, compared to two to one only four decades previously. Some seminarians had been sent to Rome and ordained there, finessing the authority of French and Spanish bishops in the colony.

In 1933, in St Peter's Basilica, Pius xi ordained the first Vietnamese bishop, Nguyen Ba Tong, following precedents in the Philippines and China. Keith describes vividly the subsequent religious procession from Saigon northward, culminating in Hanoi where Bishop Tong was the first Vietnamese to preach in the cathedral constructed forty-seven years previously. The second Vietnamese bishop to be ordained, Ho Ngoc Can, remembered Tong's ordination as the ‘day when the nation's messiah had arrived’ (p.168), a characterisation that would have offended many non-Catholics.

Keith takes us beyond the bishops to transformations in the seminaries, church publishing houses, parochial schools, Catholic Youth groups and mutual aid societies. His portrayal of the rapidly expanding pilgrimages to La Vang in Quang Tri province is one of the highlights of this book. By the late colonial era, Keith argues that ‘Vietnamese Catholic experiences were both more national and more global than ever before’ (p. 148).

Behind the word ‘national’, however, lies two different meanings: national Church and patriotic commitment. During the Popular Front era (1936–8), Catholics had to decide whether to join with socialists, Communists and Trotskyists in (peacefully) challenging the French colonial system. Some did, particularly in Saigon, but the vast majority stayed away. In 1939 Pius xi reaffirmed Rome's opposition to Communism in light of the Spanish Civil War. One prominent Catholic intellectual, Nguyen Manh Ha, lauded the Republican youth in Spain as heroes, and in September 1945 accepted a position in Ho Chi Minh's first government.

Many other Catholics responded eagerly to President Ho's call to support and defend the fledgling Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV). Others took part in mass meetings and donated money to assuage anti-Catholic feelings among some DRV adherents. Bishop Nguyen Ba Tong, in the name of all four Vietnamese bishops, dispatched a message to Pius xii requesting his benediction and prayers for Vietnam's independence. Churches hoisted Vatican and DRV flags side-by-side, and Catholic periodicals urged readers to ‘Be devoted to God – love the fatherland’. The slogan ‘Restore Vietnam's Church to Vietnamese priests’ could be found on banners hanging in and around some churches. French missionaries, aghast at these developments, had to huddle in Hanoi, Hue and Saigon.

Within months Catholic papers were denouncing Communist influence within the government, yet most Catholics continued to esteem President Ho and to take part in patriotic mobilisation. In return, Ho accepted a degree of Catholic autonomy in recognition of the greater dangers of overseas Catholics crying persecution or Vietnamese Catholics coming to believe that allegiance to the DRV was incompatible with allegiance to God and the Church.

Catholic Vietnam could have explored more deeply the relationships over time between Vietnamese non-Catholics (luong) and Catholics (giao). Keith describes the nineteenth-century anti-Catholic pogroms, but does not tell us how the figure of almost 100,000 deaths was derived. The subsequent beatification of martyrs, parading of relics and other public remembrances helped to define Vietnamese Catholic identity. Meanwhile, non-Catholics remembered bitterly the Catholics who had served French troops in quelling resistance, who tore down temples and pagodas to construct churches, and who subsequently avoided taxes and manipulated the judicial system.

Why did the number of Catholics in Vietnam level off in the early twentieth century? Missionaries often forced converts to sign a bond agreeing to pay an indemnity if they left the religion. Did the Vatican, the MEP or local priests still hope to convert the majority of Vietnamese to Catholicism? Following the 1937 Eucharistic Congress in Manila, one Vietnamese delegate wrote, ‘Please God, grant to all the Vietnamese people the ability to know God better every day, so that the whole of our nation can quickly become one, joined in following one God’ (p. 176). In the final examination for Hanoi seminarians in 1939 the principal question was ‘What are the reasons that non-Catholic countrymen have not converted?‘(p. 191). It is a question that the author of a book provocatively titled Catholic Vietnam should have addressed.