Charles Keith's Catholic Vietnam: A Church from Empire to Nation examines the history of Catholicism in Vietnam under French colonialism. Keith argues that colonialism sharpened racial differences in Vietnamese Catholic life by enabling French missionaries to dominate the religious leadership. Whereas Vietnamese priests enjoyed relative parity with European missionaries prior to the French conquest, the subsequent surge in the number of French missionaries reduced native priests to mere auxiliaries. The trend reversed, however, after the First World War. The Vatican responded to the global decline in missionary Catholicism by instituting a series of changes in the 1920s and 1930s that aimed to replace European missions with national churches. In Vietnam, the reforms included the ordination of native bishops, a more rigorous and centralized educational system for seminarians, sending talented seminarians to study abroad, and the encouragement of print culture. These changes enabled Vietnamese priests to become leaders within their own church, often to the dismay of the missionaries, and fostered a sense of a national religious community.

Keith's most innovative contribution is his exploration of the connection between religious and political change. By the middle of the twentieth century, the desire for a national church and the rejection of missionary authority translated into overwhelming Catholic support for national independence and opposition to French colonialism. Yet the relationship between Catholics and nationalists, especially the communists, was often strained. Catholics supported the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) during the August Revolution, but the religious leadership broke with the communists midway through the First Indochina War. Keith insightfully argues that the conflict between Catholics and communists was political rather than religious: the revolutionary government repeatedly tried to assert control over Catholic organizations, population, and territory, and the church fiercely defended its autonomy. Despite hostility towards the DRV, Catholic support for the French and the French-supported State of Vietnam was weak. Instead, the political choice of most Catholics by the end of the war was an independent nationalist and co-religionist: Ngô Đình Diệm, the future leader of the Republic of Vietnam (RVN, or South Vietnam). The book's later chapters also examine the spread of transnational Catholic trends to Vietnam in the form of social Catholicism, Catholic anticommunism, and new religious organizations.

The strengths of Catholic Vietnam are manifold. Besides an elegant overarching argument, several chapters engage with longstanding and highly politicized historical issues, including the role of missionaries and Vietnamese Catholics during the initial conquest; the relationship between missionaries and the colonial government; and the attitude of Vietnamese Catholics towards anticolonialism, nationalism, and communism. The author's careful analysis dispels the myth that Vietnamese Catholics uniformly welcomed French colonialism and that the colonial government practiced favoritism towards missionaries and their flock. Particularly fascinating is the account of religious violence in the latter half of the nineteenth century. The author explains that, although the first French invasion from 1858 to 1862 ended the official persecution of Catholics by the Nguyễn state, growing French influence radicalized relations between ordinary Catholics and non-Catholics and indirectly contributed to the communitarian violence that erupted after subsequent invasions. The study also provides a useful foundation for understanding later developments in the RVN, including the emergence of Christian trade unionism, the origins of Vietnamese Personalism, and religious tensions between Catholics and Buddhists in the mid-1960s.

Perhaps Keith's most surprising finding is that Vietnamese Catholic nationalism was the result of Vatican reforms designed to create a national church, a conclusion that upends the assumed contradiction between the religious and political loyalties of Vietnamese Catholics. Yet the study raises as many questions as it answers. Was Vatican-derived nationalism the dominant form of Vietnamese Catholic nationalism, or did Vietnamese Catholics also express competing ideas about nationalism? How did transnational Catholicism affect national identity? How did Vietnamese Catholics envision postcolonial Vietnam, and was their vision specifically Catholic?

The study is primarily an institutional and social history, not an intellectual history, and leaves the above questions unresolved. For example, chapter 4, “Vietnamese Catholic Tradition on Trial,” surveys the development of Catholic print culture up until the 1930s, but it is not a history of ideas. The chapter takes inspiration from David G. Marr's Vietnamese Tradition on Trial, 1920–1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), but whereas Marr explicitly argues that Vietnamese intellectuals questioned neo-Confucianism and embraced communism, Keith never explains what particular tradition was on trial for Catholic thinkers. His discussion of global Catholicism exhibits similar problems. He effectively demonstrates the significance of organizations such as Catholic Action, the Catholic League, and various youth groups, but he does not sufficiently analyze the ideas behind transnational Catholic thought to assess their influence on Vietnamese intellectual life. A more developed discussion of ideas would have strengthened his claim for the importance of transnational Catholic trends in colonial Vietnam.

It is admittedly too much to expect any particular book to cover all aspects of a given topic, and, minor issues aside, Catholic Vietnam is an excellent addition to the scholarship on Vietnamese history. Beyond Vietnam studies, the volume's clear and engaging prose makes the book suitable for undergraduate courses on Southeast Asian and religious history. The final chapter on the First Indochina War should be of particular interest to scholars of the Vietnam War because it offers a counterpoint to communist-centric accounts of the earlier conflict.