The Virgin Heads South: Northern Catholic Refugees and their Clergy in South Vietnam, 1954–1964

Abstract

This chapter examines the concept of religious authority as practised amongst Catholic parish communities from northern Vietnam when transplanted into the South as a consequence of the North–South transmigration of 1954–1955. Here, priest-leaders mandated by both the Catholic hierarchy and their refugee parishioners found themselves exercising authority in a variety of manners which would push the parameters of clerical leadership as ordinarily understood in a Catholic context. They did so in a manner consistent with their traditional role as socio-political, as well as religious leaders, in northern Vietnamese Catholic communities. Yet this role so differed from that of clergy in the southern Vietnamese Church that it served to further differentiate the northern Catholics from their southern counterparts.