Inculturation for mission: The transformation of the French Notre-Dame des Victoires into Our Lady of La Vang in Vietnam 1998

A history of La Vang

In order to offer a better understanding of the phenomenon of Our Lady of La Vang in Vietnam as well as its standing among the Vietnamese Catholic communities overseas, I will present a brief history of the national pilgrimage shrine that has been closely associated with the statue of Our Lady of La Vang. According to Vietnamese Catholic legend, a group of Vietnamese Catholics experienced Marian devotion during the persecutions of Christianity in 1798 (Vietnamese Episcopal Conference, 2004: 504–509). When the persecutions subsided, Bishop Marie Antoine Gasper, a French missionary, built a small chapel in La Vang in 1901 and ordered the placement at the shrine of a French statue, which was identical to the Notre-Dame des Victoires in France (Nguyen Hong Phuc 1997: 54).

In the early twentieth century, numerous Catholics began to make pilgrimages to La Vang to pray before Mary. In 1961, church hierarchy in Vietnam consecrated La Vang as the national pilgrimage shrine. Thus, for many decades, hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese Catholics have been making pilgrimages to La Vang, to celebrate the anniversary of the Marian apparition during the summer time (Union of Catholic Asian News, 1999). Thus, the French statue of Notre-Dame des Victoires had been at the shrine and honored by the Vietnamese Catholics for almost a century. Although the original statue was destroyed during the 1970s wars, a local pastor, Le Van Cau, replaced the statue later with another similar French representation.

It appears that, for many decades, the Vietnamese Catholics had welcomed the statue of the French Notre-Dame des Victoires without questioning its foreign provenance. In the 1980s, however, a group of Vietnamese Catholic refugees in the United States started reflecting upon the issue of praying to an imported statue in the light of the cultural changes that were taking place in Vietnam. Like many groups of immigrants, the Vietnamese refugees had to wrestle with their cultural identity in a foreign land. In the midst of this struggle, some writers, musicians, and artists began to produce works that carried the themes of their homeland (Bui Vinh Phuc, 1996).

In an interview with Van Nhan Tran, the creator of the statue of Our Lady of La Vang, Tran revealed the background to the La Vang project. Tran was among the first generations of Vietnamese refugees in the United States. As a Vietnamese Catholic artist, Tran was inspired to create religious artworks. However, when reflecting upon the image of Mary, Tran was confronted by the French image of Mary. He then raised the question, Why was the apparition of Mary on the soil of Vietnam not a Vietnamese but a French Madonna? It was the question that motivated him in 1980 to create a Marian statue in the image of a Vietnamese woman. In the same year, the statue, Mother of Vietnam, was consecrated at the first congress of the Vietnamese Federation of Catholics in San Francisco (Tran Phuc Long, 1999).

While the Catholics in Vietnam were struggling with communism, the Vietnamese Catholics overseas had total freedom to express their religious thoughts through writing, music, and the visual arts. In the 1990s, when the church in Vietnam was preparing for the bicentennial jubilee of the Marian apparition in La Vang (1798–1998), Tran’s statue of Mother of Vietnam was introduced to Nguyen Nhu The, the Archbishop of Hue, who was in charge of the coming event in La Vang. Tran’s work of art caught the attention of Archbishop Nguyen who suggested to him to modify the statue in a manner in which Vietnamese cultural elements such as dressing, the mother–son relationship, specifically the position of baby Jesus in his mother’s arms, are all well expressed. Tran welcomed Archbishop Nguyen’s suggestions and created a new statue which came to be known as Duc Me La Vang (Our Lady of La Vang). In a meeting of the Vietnamese bishops in Hanoi in February 1998, the Federation of Vietnamese Bishops’ Conference discussed and decided to replace Notre-Dame des Victoires with Our Lady of La Vang. As a result, the installation of the new statue took place at the national pilgrimage shrine in La Vang in August 1998.

Quest for cultural identity: a collective effort

In perspective, one can see this entire project as the result of a collective effort towards change. Although Tran Van Nhan was the sole creator of the artwork, he was expounding feelings about colonialism which were shared by many others. The Vietnamese Catholics, including the church authority in Vietnam, shared Tran’s vision. This view was manifested in the formal letter of Archbishop Nguyen to Monsieur Mai Thanh Luong, then Bishop Mai Thanh Luong, who would later become much involved in the project. In his letter, Archbishop Nguyen, on behalf of the Vietnamese Federation of Bishops, stated that the Marian statue, which had been honored by the Vietnamese Catholics for decades, was too foreign. Thus, he insisted, it was time for the church in Vietnam to be symbolically represented by a new statue that would display Vietnamese cultural characteristics. Archbishop Nguyen’s letter expressed the desire of the Vietnamese Catholics to return to their cultural roots, through the indigenization of Marian veneration. Nguyen wrote,

The statue of Our Lady of La Vang, which has been honored at the Holy Shrine in La Vang, was a copy of the figure of French Notre Dame des Victoires in Paris, France. Some places have produced many different statues of Our Lady of La Vang, which has confused people. We need to choose a standard image of Our Lady of La Vang which should be made by a Vietnamese artist, and the new figure needs to have the characteristics of Vietnamese culture and express a Mother of compassion and glory at the same time. (Vietnamese Apostolate of Fatima, 1998: 31)

Some people believe that the project would have not taken place were it not for Vietnam regaining its independence from French domination in 1954. A few decades after the demise of colonialism, the church was still hesitant to implement drastic changes. Because the church in Vietnam had been strongly inspired by French Catholicism in many aspects such as religious formation, Christian arts, and architecture, radical innovation would take time. It is significant to note that while the church in China had their native bishops since the 17th century, the church in Vietnam was not allowed to have its own bishops until 1933 (Le Ngoc Bich, 2009).

For almost a century, therefore, Catholicism in Vietnam had been very much modeled after the so-called “mother church” in France, with the exception of some Vietnamese practices that gradually made their way into religious worship. From a political viewpoint, whether the Vietnamese bishops attempted to distance themselves gradually from the church in France is questionable. However, they wanted to reclaim the value of their native culture and make the church become a church of Vietnam rather than a church in Vietnam as in previous centuries. The idea of constructing local churches in Asia and distancing themselves from Western influences has been initiated and promoted by the Federation of Asian Bishops’ Conferences (FABC) in 1974 and the following decades (Rosales and Arévalo, 1997). The divesting of the French statue and replacing it with Our Lady of La Vang in 1998 bespeaks their intentions.

Inculturation and mission

Indeed, the missionary approach employed by the Vietnamese Episcopal Conference was seen as an implementation of the FABC’s proposal. In the earliest document of the FABC, the Asian bishops proposed a vision of the local church as a missionary community. Parallel to the emphasis on the role of the local church in mission was the rediscovery of religious and cultural values through which Asian people have lived. The Asian bishops stated, “We must explore the interface of the Gospel’s meanings and values with the realities of Asia and its many peoples—its histories and cultures, religions and religious traditions, and especially its ‘poor masses’ in every country” (Rosales and Arévalo, 1997: xix).

In the context of Vietnam, the transformation of French Notre-Dame des Victoires into Our Lady of La Vang manifested a new form of church, and as a result, it raised challenges as well. On the one hand, French culture had permeated Catholicism in Vietnam since the French colonized the country in 1858 until 1954 (Denney, 1990: 271). Thus, dramatic change in the church would be difficult. On the other hand, one could anticipate negative reactions to the repurposing within the church (Phan Ton, 2003). For example, while many Vietnamese Catholics embraced the new presentation, others viewed it with confusion and puzzlement. During the first few years of the installation of Our Lady of La Vang in La Vang, numerous essays expressed disappointment with this modification. For example, Phan Ton (2003), in his article, “Me Nao Trong Hon?” (Which Mother is More Important?) captured the negative feelings of many Catholics toward the change. Phan raised concerns about the sacredness and validity of the new image. In addition, one might envision that a new challenge in Christology would arise when presenting Mary in the image of a Vietnamese lady in contrast to the common image of a Western Jesus.

Given these practical concerns, taking down the statue of the French Notre-Dame des Victoires and replacing it with the Vietnamese Our Lady of La Vang required great consideration from the church authorities. Archbishop Nguyen Nhu The, in one of his letters to Monsieur Mai Thanh Luong then Bishop of Diocese of Orange, wrote,

Upon conducting extensive research and following a careful deliberation, the Federation of Vietnamese Bishops’ Conference decided to choose the Marian statue of Our Lady of La Vang by the artist Van Nhan to become the official representation of the Virgin Mary in the Vietnamese Catholic world everywhere, beginning August 1, 1998. This decision also aims to mark the bicentennial jubilee of Marian apparition in La Vang. (1798–1998) (Vietnamese Apostolate of Fatima, 1998: 31).

National identity through dress codes

One of the visible signs of the image of Our Lady of La Vang which shows Vietnamese national identity is the way the Madonna is dressed. The anthropologist Penny Edwards (2002) has analyzed the importance of costumes as a representation of gender, ethnicity, and nationality:

Recent scholarship has shed valuable light on the fluidity of dress as a marker of nationality, on the invention and manipulation of “national costumes” by regimes and intellectuals, and on the construction of imperial typologies of fashion and nation . . . From Burma to Borneo, Colonial encounters refigured clothing as a boundary marker of race and nation. (Penny Edwards, 2002: 390–91)

Edwards’s work sheds much light on the localization of dress presented in the project of Our Lady of La Vang. Unlike the Notre-Dame des Victories, who wears a large garment over her entire body and a majestic crown on her head, the Vietnamese Madonna wears a long white tunic known as Ao Dai covered by a blue gown. The combination of the two was a special design for the queen in the old days or for a bride at her contemporary wedding ceremony. Although traditional wedding clothes have been very diverse in Vietnam, depending on the era, region, and occasion, it is believed that the Ao Dai worn by Our Lady of La Vang was modeled after the Ao menh phu (royal Ao dai) of Nguyen dynasty court ladies. When women wear this type of royal Ao dai today, they also don a Khan dong (headdress). In a traditional wedding, not only does the bride wear Ao dai and Khan dong, but the groom too wears Ao dai and Khan dong but in different colors.

The child Jesus, who is carried by Our Lady of La Vang, also wears traditional attire. In an interview with Tran Van Nhan, the creator of the sculpture of Our Lady of La Vang, Tran admitted that he intentionally portrayed the child Jesus with black hair, wearing the Vietnamese traditional attire in light red, a symbolic color of royalty. On some special occasions such as New Year or solemn liturgical celebrations, Vietnamese male children wear this type of traditional dress. Thus, the skillful incorporation of Vietnamese traditional dress into the statue of Our Lady of La Vang by Tran Van Nhan shows the distinctive characteristics of national identity. Using the example of Madam Nguyen Thi Binh, the representative of the National Liberation Front who wore Ao Dai at antiwar conferences in Europe, Rambo (1987: 118–19) comments that “By the time Madame Binh was marching through the streets of Paris, the Ao Dai was indeed a true symbol of Vietnamese national identity and the fact of its foreign origin was largely forgotten”.

A new way of being church

As mentioned above, the indigenization of the French Madonna can be seen as a new missionary project through which the church in Vietnam desired to engage in dialogue with people of other religions in Vietnam. In this vision, the church is no longer seen as a foreign and isolated religious institution; rather, a new image of the native Vietnamese Madonna can gradually make the church itself incarnate in the culture.

Although the transformation of Our Lady of La Vang took place within Catholic circles, it was never isolated from other religions in Vietnam. Rather it demonstrates a continuous reference for Mother Goddess worship, especially the strong devotion to the Goddess of Mercy Guan-yin common among Vietnamese Buddhists. It is significant to note that while female Bodhisattvas were transformed from a male Indian Bodhisattva, Our Lady of La Vang was now transformed from a French figure.

In the minds and hearts of the Vietnamese Buddhists, Mother of Mercy Guan-yin has instilled peace and comfort in their lives, especially in trying times. Many women coming from Asia to live in the United States bring with them stories of Guan-yin. They learned to revere her as little girls. Chinese, Japanese, and even Burmese women also have experienced Guan-yin as a compassionate companion, an influence that constitutes stability in their new American lives. As Sandy Boucher also notes,

Particularly in the case of Vietnamese women, Guanyin may have interceded in their attempts to flee their country. In the refugee camps in Thailand, where the Vietnamese found safety, large statues of Guanyin were constructed, for the Vietnamese credit Guanyin with saving their lives and aiding their escape. The boat people called on Guanyin, and many believe that she saved their particular craft from the storms, starvation, and pirates that brought other boats to ruin. (Boucher, 2000: 16)

As millions of Vietnamese Catholics gather at Marian shrines to pray, Vietnamese Buddhists also gather at temples to pray to the Goddess of Mercy Guan-yin (Quan Am). In the months of February and March and on the New Year days, Buddhist followers from across the country make pilgrimages to Chua Huong or Perfume Pagoda, an ancient Buddhist temple in suburban Hanoi, capital of Vietnam, to pray to Guan-yin (Trang Thanh Hien, 2005: 11). To Vietnamese Buddhists, this holy place is seen as a “national pilgrimage center.” Individuals, groups, and even private companies organize pilgrim trips to this place frequently.

On the streets of Vietnam, one can easily see small Buddhist altars carefully built in the inter-city buses as well as in private cars owned by Buddhists. Nguyen Minh Ngoc (2008), a Buddhist scholar, states that Goddess of Mercy Guan-yin has become an integral part of Vietnamese daily life. Nguyen also compares the relationship between Guan-yin and the lives of Buddhist followers to breath and food for the body. It is significant that both Vietnamese Buddhists and Catholics present Mary and Guan-yin with a beautiful, calm, caring, and compassionate face. Within Vietnamese Catholicism, popular devotion to Mother Mary, Our Lady of La Vang, is very important to Vietnamese Catholics because popular devotion to Mary has sustained the faith of Vietnamese Catholics over centuries.

From an interreligious perspective, the transformation of the French Notre-Dame des Victoires into Our Lady of La Vang marked a new transformation of the church in Vietnam itself. The transformation hopes to bring Vietnamese Catholics closer to their fellow countrymen. For several centuries, for example, tension and conflict between Catholicism and Buddhism have distanced Buddhists and Catholics from one another. As Evers (2005) comments, “Due to the closeness with the French colonizers, the Vietnamese Catholics suffered from the odium that they had joined a ‘foreign’ religion and thus had become ‘lackeys of the French’ and traitors of the national cause” (Evers, 2005).

Dialogue with Vietnamese religious tradition

In the last couple of decades, many studies of popular religious icons have focused on the ancient cult of the Mother Goddess (Dao Mau). There has been also an increase in the number of pilgrimages to shrines and temples dedicated to the ancient Mother Goddess in the last two decades (Taylor, 2004). Catholic pilgrimages to the Marian shrines in several places such as La Vang, Tra Kieu, Binh Trieu, and Vinh Long have also increased (Vietnamese Episcopal Conference, 2004). To explain this religious phenomenon, some scholars sought to look at Vietnamese cultural dynamics, especially the feminine aspect of Vietnamese society, which manifests itself in the cult of the Mother Goddess (Tran Ngoc Them, 2004: 234–37).

According to some scholars, the cult of the Mother Goddess in Vietnam stemmed from a more ancient religious belief in a multitude of spirits (Nguyen Minh San, 1996). This animistic pantheon included the spirit of the sun, the spirit of the moon, the spirit of natural phenomena, and many others that were worshipped because they were understood as the living resources of the earth (Ngo Duc Thinh, 1996). One of the most significant figures was Mother Au Co. According to the myth, Au Co stood at the origins of Vietnam as a people. The Vietnamese believe that the original Vietnamese were born of the same maternal womb, and the story has become a metaphysical, ethical, and spiritual principle for the Vietnamese (Ngo Si Lien, 1993).

Although Au Co was a mythical figure, she has become a sacred symbol of a Divine Mother in the minds of the Vietnamese. Au Co, according to the legend, was a marvelous mother who not only demonstrated an endless love for her children, but also taught them to cultivate the land, develop careers, and make clothes to cover their bodies (Nguyen Minh San, 1996: 18). With this belief in mind, the Vietnamese built the first temple of Mother Au Co in Song Thao district, a small town in the northern part of Vietnam.

In addition to Mother Au Co, Mother Man Nuong has been important in the lives of the Vietnamese. According to Vietnamese myths, Mother Man Nuong was believed to be mother of the universe. She had four daughters who governed four different natural domains: cloud, rain, thunderstorm, and lightning (Ngo Duc Thinh, 2004: 223). These four daughters were later incorporated into Buddhism, and they were called Tu Phap (Four Powers). Rooted in an agricultural society, Tu Phap primarily functioned as a response to the needs of farmers. When Buddhism was introduced to Vietnam in the first century, Mother Man Nuong became the first Vietnamese Buddhist Mother Goddess (2004: 223). Buddhism, in this cultural context, was incorporated into the cult of the Mother Goddess, and it became a new form of Vietnamese Buddhism. The four daughters of Man Nuong also became four Buddhist Bodhisattvas (2004: 225). Since then, these female goddesses have played an important part in Vietnamese Buddhism. Nowadays, many Buddhist temples have six statues: the statues of Buddha, Mother Man Nuong, and her four daughters (Tu Phap). This combination of original Buddhism and a native religious cult reflects a beautiful marriage between two religious traditions at the very beginning of Buddhism in Vietnam. Despite the mixture of the two religious traditions, most worshipers have been drawn to the worship of female Bodhisattvas.

The worship of female divinities, which is an outstanding feature of the cult of the Mother Goddess and of Buddhism, has a strong parallel in Vietnamese Catholicism. While Mary is not worshipped as a divinity, many Catholics pray to her rather than to Jesus. Vietnamese Catholics have discovered in Mary a gentle heart, a merciful Lady, a protector, and a great source of support (Phan, 2005: 118). The primacy of Marian devotion among Catholics is evidenced by numerous features. For example, all the Catholic pilgrimage shrines in Vietnam were dedicated to Mary. Hundreds of Catholic parishes in the nation chose Mary to be their patron (Nguyen Hong Duong, 2001: 310–15). The phenomenon reflects a popular form of Vietnamese religiosity in a culture in which people are strongly drawn to a mother rather than a father.

Marian devotion and cultural heritage

In Vietnamese Catholicism, more significantly, some scholars recently have discovered that several Marian devotional practices in the Catholic Church have adopted rituals from the cult of the Mother Goddess. According to Nguyen Hong Duong (2004) some Marian devotional practices, such as chanting, procession, dancing, and offering flowers to Mary, have been practiced in the cult of the Mother Goddess for many centuries. These observations show that besides the influences of the Catholic Church in Marian devotion among Vietnamese Catholics, the cult of the Mother Goddess was another strong influence (2004: 243).

In addition to the religious and cultural aspects of the indigenization process, there was another dynamic operating at La Vang. The church in Vietnam was trying to present a new image of Catholicism to the Vietnamese population. This new image bears Vietnamese cultural characteristics. By presenting this new image of Catholicism, the church authority sought to engage in dialogue with its own culture embedded with Vietnamese religiosity.

Conclusion

Examining the project of Our Lady of La Vang in light of mission, one can realize that the church in Vietnam in the postcolonial period desired to engage in dialogue with Vietnamese culture and religions. If the church in previous decades had isolated itself from culture and religions, the church in the last four decades has attempted to incarnate itself in the culture through the indigenization of the French Madonna. The transformation of the French Notre-Dame des Victoires into the image of a Vietnamese woman indeed proposed a new way of being church and a new way of doing mission in the pluralistically religious setting of Vietnam. Although the struggle for cultural identity among the Vietnamese Catholics contributed to the transformation of the French Notre-Dame des Victoires, the church’s vision of mission through dialogue strongly manifests. In addition, one can envision that the project of Our Lady of La Vang has laid a foundation for constructing a new theology in the context of Vietnam. This theology bears the feminine characteristic of God imbedded in the Vietnamese cult of the Mother Goddess. Moreover, as Vietnamese Catholics and Buddhists share their common practices and experience spiritual transformation through devotion to Mary and Guan-yin, interreligious dialogue between Vietnamese Buddhists and Catholics will become more fruitful, given the discovery of significant commonalities between the two traditions. Third, the transformation of the French Notre-Dame des Victoires into the image of a Vietnamese woman helps the church in Vietnam to rediscover Vietnamese cultural roots in which Marian devotion was developed and strengthened.