source: <Vatican Insider> proche de la très modérée Secrétairie d'État: optimistes malgré 35 ans de répression "non-sanglante" par les autorités vietnamiennes, les évêques négocient et espèrent aboutir dans quelque temps à ouvrir une Université Catholique à Ha-Noi, une fissure dans le monopole intellectuel du Parti.

It would be five years before the authorities decided to grant the Catholic Bishops of North and South Vietnam the right meet and discuss the situation, the role and the identity of the local Church. The meeting which took place in Hanoi in late April of 1980 produced the famous pastoral letter of the episcopate that is still a milestone in the history of the Vietnamese Church.
In that letter a “pastoral option” was sanctioned that suggested continuing to serve the people right in the places, times and spaces allowed by the regime, without insisting on antagonism or pushing on the accelerator of claiming sacrosanct freedom of religion, of education, of evangelization.
In that text, the first ever co-signed by the bishops of North and South, the prelates, taking note of the new political order, invited the faithful to “live the gospel in the nation, with the intent to serve the happiness of our compatriots.” The Church did not present itself to the government as a counter-power, nor even as an “enemy of the state” or an alien nation. But it was established rather as a fully Vietnamese entity, ready to offer its particular contribution to the growth and development of the nation, according to a formula that had great success in the following years and is still the basis of the good relations existing between the Church and civil authorities: “Being good Catholics and good citizens at the same time.”
Forty years after that historic step, in which the Church, penalized and silenced, did not retreat into a ghetto nor choose a confrontational approach with the red regime, another key step faces the gates of history, with its obvious symbolic significance: the imminent revival of the Catholic university in Vietnam. The measures for opening the first Vietnamese Catholic Institute to be built in the city of Ho Chi Minh have been dispatched, and the civil and religious authorities are finalizing the details of a project that they hope will mark a new flourishing and the definitive return of the Church in the field of education.

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