Religion in Vietnam Freer but Not Fully Free : Rights: Communist regime loosens reins on worshipers. But church groups still face limits.

It is early Sunday morning in Hanoi, capital of one of the world’s last officially Communist--and atheist--countries. The streets are nearly deserted except for a few couples playing badminton in the parks or going through the slow-motion ritual of tai chi.

But at 6 a.m., the sonorous tolling of church bells telegraphs the hour throughout the city. At St. Joseph’s, a Roman Catholic cathedral, stragglers scramble for the few remaining seats at the back of the immense granite church while a pipe organist plays Handel in the sweltering heat.

Vietnam is experiencing an old-fashioned religious revival, which in many ways parallels the country’s opening toward capitalism after decades of economic stagnation. In contrast to the growing cynicism of many Western countries, the churches and Buddhist temples of Vietnam are packed with worshipers, most of them young.

“God is good,” said a long-haired young man named Nguyen who was attending the Mass at St. Joseph’s, summoning up his few words of English to explain his presence in church. While the Vietnamese government may not yet share Nguyen’s sentiments, it is no longer trying to prevent people from showing up in church, as it managed to do up until six years ago.

“Since 1989, we have a new policy to liberalize religion more,” said Dang Nghiem Van, director of the state-sponsored Institute of Religion. “There are many more churches and temples than before.”

Even the country’s severest critics agree that freedom of religious worship now seems assured in Vietnam, in sharp contrast to China, where religion is closely controlled. But while freedom of worship is openly permitted, both Catholic and Buddhist church organizations are increasingly chafing under the tight controls still demanded by Hanoi.

“The party and government continued policies designed to control religious hierarchies and organized religious activities, in part because the government perceived that religion may threaten the party’s monopoly of influence,” noted the U.S. State Department’s 1995 Human Rights Report.

A sign of the times came this month during the funeral of the Roman Catholic archbishop of Ho Chi Minh City, Paul Nguyen Van Binh, who had died at the age of 85. Binh was the elder statesman of the church in Vietnam, having been appointed to his job in 1955 by Pope Pius XII.

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The funeral for Binh was attended by 30,000 people, and a foreign bishop--the Vatican’s representative in Bangkok--was allowed to say Mass. It was the first open-air Mass in Vietnam since the fall of Saigon, the former name for Ho Chi Minh City, in 1975.

While on the surface Binh’s funeral appeared to show a willingness by Hanoi to compromise on religious matters, church officials felt the opposite. Hanoi and the Vatican have been at loggerheads for years on the question of choosing Binh’s successor.

The Vatican initially named Bishop Nguyen Van Thuan to succeed Binh, but Hanoi adamantly refused because he is the nephew of the late South Vietnamese dictator Ngo Dinh Diem. The Vatican withdrew the nomination and tried to appoint an archbishop to handle just the administration of the archdiocese, but Hanoi also rejected that nomination.

Hanoi’s Religious Affairs Committee, which declined to speak with The Times, insists that while the Vatican can nominate clergy, it has the sole power to approve the choice. Faced with little alternative, the Vatican has reluctantly agreed to Hanoi’s terms, according to Western diplomats. After all, the Beijing government allows the Vatican no contact at all with the church in China.

“When you are not permitted to enter your own house, you will ask the policeman standing outside for permission,” said a priest who asked to remain anonymous.

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In addition to vetoing ecclesiastical appointments, the Vietnamese state council places a quota on the number of men accepted for religious training each year. It must also approve appointments of seminary graduates as priests.

Although normally kept out of the public eye to avoid an open confrontation, the bitter differences over the administration of the church were obvious when Archbishop Binh gave an interview to a Ho Chi Minh City newspaper in May, shortly before his death.

Asked by a correspondent from Saigon Giai Phong (Liberated Saigon) whether after 20 years he was still scared of the Communists, Binh answered, “Yes, I am afraid.

“When we read major party and state policies and lines and meet with high-ranking leaders, we see that everything is easy, but when we manage grass-roots activities, we still encounter very complicated problems,” Binh said.

“When I am informed of the difficulties facing Catholic priests, clergymen and laymen in various localities, I really do not know what to say. Even at the central level, there are many very simple problems that should have been resolved once and for all instead of being dragged on and on by the application of partial solutions,” he said.

While the relationship between the church and Hanoi has been characterized by tensions, the situation contrasts sharply with the state of open hostility that exists between the government and the country’s Buddhist leadership.

Ironically, while the Roman Catholic Church, which has about 6 million adherents in Vietnam, was once viewed with suspicion because of its connection to colonial France, the Buddhist church played an anti-imperialist role in the 1970s and is far more popular, with an estimated 20 million believers.

But the official Buddhist organization, the Unified Buddhist Church of Vietnam, was disbanded in 1982 and replaced by a government-sanctioned Vietnam Buddhist Church, which still controls the vast majority of temples.

“The Buddhist church always was an independent movement and was critical of the South Vietnamese regimes,” said Penelope Faulkner, a spokeswoman for the Unified Buddhist Church in Paris. “The [Communist] party now perceives it as a human rights movement, and a challenge to their authority.”

Late last year, five monks from the Unified Buddhist Church were arrested for preparing to hand out relief supplies they had gathered for victims of flooding in southern Vietnam. The government contended that they should have worked through state organizations.

At the new year, police arrested the two most prominent leaders of the church, Thich Huyen Quang and Thich Quang Do, and has still not brought them to trial or leveled charges against them.

The U.S monitoring group Human Rights Watch/Asia said that at least two dozen Buddhist leaders have been arrested since 1992, and at least 13 remain in detention.

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“What has precipitated government action against the Unified Buddhist Church are the calls by its senior leaders for the government to recognize the church, to allow it autonomy in managing its religious affairs, to return properties confiscated after 1975 and to release religious and political prisoners,” the group said in a report in March. “These demands have been framed in blunt language that is highly critical of the Communist Party, but they essentially represent complaints that are shared by other religions in Vietnam.”

The most recent confrontation took place in May, 1993, after a young man sat down next to a temple in Hue and set himself on fire. The immolation, which appears to have been prompted by matters unrelated to the church, nonetheless led to a cycle of demonstrations by Buddhists and increasing police repression at the temple, resulting in a number of arrests.

As the protests and arrests escalated, a 73-year-old monk named Thich Dong Thien, head of a monastery in Binh Dinh province, wrote to the authorities in May complaining about the crackdown on his church. But his words could speak for many in the Buddhist leadership about their views of the government’s efforts to control the church.

“A society, however spiritually or morally decadent it has become, should never reach the point where it forces disciples to betray their masters and children to denounce their parents,” Thien wrote.

“If the authorities ignore our concerns, we shall be forced to understand that your laws only serve to impose power and brute force. So far we have been patient, but when our patience comes to an end, we shall find more effective ways of action.”