Vietnam: Christmas Marked with Violent Crackdowns

From Catholic World News

Beatings, Church raids, arrests, forbidding Christmas Mass, bulldozing monasteries – are some of the violent incidents inflicted on Christians by authorities in Vietnam. 

An estimate of 2000 Protestants were locked out of a Christmas celebration scheduled to take place at the National Convention Center in the Tu Liem district of Hanoi on Sunday December 19. The organizers had rented the auditorium but at the last minute the managers of the state-owned facility unitarily terminated the contract.  Deeply disappointed to see the door locked and hundreds of uniformed police chasing them away, the Christians began singing and praying in the square in front of the building. Police called for reinforcements and started punching some Christians, striking some with nightsticks. Eventually police reinforcements wielding cattle prods dispersed the crowd the site, but not before at least six people including Rev. Nguyen Huu Bao, the scheduled speaker at the event, had been arrested. 

Thousands of Vietnamese Catholics Pray for End to Persecution

From Catholic World News

Following the siege of a parish in Hanoi, the brutal beating of a religious, and the desecration of a crucifix, thousands of Vietnamese Catholics gathered on January 24 at the Redemptorist monastery in Ho Chi Minh City (the former Saigon) in southern Vietnam to pray for the end of the persecution of the Church in the Asian nation. Earlier in the day, thousands of Catholics gathered at the cathedral in Hanoi to pray for the nation.

State-controlled media outlets reported, with evident delight, that the parishioners at Dong Chiem had been forced to remove all crosses from a hill on the grounds of what had long been the parish cemetery. The demolition of a large crucifix there sparked a confrontation between parishioners and police. While the state media reported that Catholics had been persuaded to move their crosses through “a long process of patient reasoning, persuasion, and education,” the parishioners said that they were victims of harassment, intimidation, and violent coercion.

The United States Commission on International Religious Freedom has repeatedly asked the US president and State Department to redesignate Vietnam as a country of particular concern in recognition of its egregious violations of religious freedom, but both the Bush and Obama administrations have chosen not to follow the commission’s recommendations. The nation had been designated a country of particular concern until 2006.

6.8% of the Vietnam’s 85.2 million residents are Catholic.

Source(s): these links will take you to other sites, in a new window.

• “Let us not forget our fellow Redemptorists and the faithful of Vietnam”- Appeal from Redemptorist Superior General (Fides)
• Vietnam: parish under siege; Hanoi archdiocese protests police violence (CWN, 1/21)
• USCIRF Urges President to Designate Vietnam as a CPC in Letter (USCIRF)
• Countries of Particular Concern (USCIRF)