Retired General Hoanh Linh Do Mau
11422 Iowa Avenue
Los Angeles, CA 90026
June 15, 1999
Hon.....
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Your Excellence,
Our country, Vietnam, was invaded by foreign countries, occupied by the French for eighty years and involved in a civil war from 1954 to 1975.
Culturally, economically, politically and socially, many lives have been turned upside down., time after time. During the period beginning with the French occupation through the end of the Civil war in 1975, at least five million Vietnamese were killed or starved to death.
The Vatican was one of the main players in the troubles mentioned above. Now, under a different approach, the Pope, John Paul II, wants to interfere in our nation affairs again, disguised under the banner of religious and civil rights.
This letter expresses the protest of the overseas Buddhist Community against the interference in the internal affairs of Vietnam by the Vatican.
Your attention to this matter will be very helpful to our people.
Sincerely yours,
Retired General Hoanh Linh Do Mau
An Open Letter To His Holiness Pope John II
On The Occasion Of His Proposed Official Visit To
Vietnam in 1999.
Your Holiness,
For many years now the Vatican and the Catholic Church in Vietnam have campaigned hard to enable you to visit Vietnam during 1999. We the overseas Vietnamese Buddhist community, applaud all efforts to improve international relations which are based on good heart and respect of political or religious leaders, in order to improve understanding and to enrich mutual relations amongst nations and religions in the world.
However, we question your decision to make an official visit to Vietnam at this time. This is not only because the Vietnamese Government has no plan to welcome you. Indeed, as you must be aware, in the past the Vietnamese have been shamefully treated by imperialists. They were exploited and left poor and starving by colonialists. They were also killed, wounded and displaced during various wars. We, along with our ancestors, consider the Vatican and the Catholic Church in Vietnam partly responsible for these historical scars. The Vatican was a voluntary agent of and conspired with the international war mongers against our homeland Vietnam.
Except for a few adherents, who have never questioned the earthly power of the Vatican, the majority of non-Catholic Vietnamese do not approve of your proposed visit. Many Vietnamese Catholic followers expected that the Vatican would support practices to reform the Church and support historical, cultural, customary, traditional and religious differences amongst people of different nations and believed that it would respect others' rights of belief and their individual potential to define themselves. They may be very disappointed with the recalcitrant attitudes of the Vatican and so may not want to welcome you to Vietnam either. We believe the people of Vietnam need time to heal those deep wounds which were inflicted on our country, with the complicit knowledge and support of the Vatican.
For 80 years under first the French colonialists and then for 30 years during the Vietnam War, initiated by France and followed by the United States of America, the Vietnamese people suffered greatly! During these eras we did not witness any Pope compassionate enough to visit Vietnam to console or to protect innocent Vietnamese people from the interference of international powers and internal dictators. Furthermore, for the Catholic Church in Vietnam, colonialism and warfare provided perfect business opportunities for the Vatican to accumulate more power, wealth and influence. For instance in 1939 the Catholic Foreign Mission in Vietnam collected over 50 million French francs (This amount came directly from the exploitation of the Vietnamese people). Also by that year the Catholic Foreign Mission owned a quarter of agricultural land in South Vietnam as well as numerous rubber plantations, mines and 28,500 hectares of land for growing rice. It also owned many properties in Vietnamese cities. These statistica figures were conservatively reported by a Catholic priest, Father Tran Tam Tinh.
Catholic followers comprise well below 10 per cent of the population in Vietnam yet the Catholic Church has 'donated' Vietnam to the Virgin Mary. During the time the United States of America was in control, South Vietnam had two presidents. These were both your followers who were responsible for pushing South Vietnam deeper into the war and making the country completely dependent on foreign states for survival. The first President, Ngo Dinh Diem, started the war and was assassinated for his failure to 'manage' the war. The second President, Nguyen Van Thieu, surrendered to the communists on behalf of the United States of America and was covertly transported out of Vietnam before the war ended. Thousand of churches, commercial, educational and cultural buildings were built by the blood of Vietnamese and blood money donated by foreign powers and while the Vatican did not contribute anything to these constructions, it supported and endorsed the killing of innocent people during the Vietnam War in the name of a 'Holy War against Communism' in Indochina.
History shows that Vatican policy during the wars was to divide and conquer the Vietnamese through the proselytising activities of Catholic priests sent out to convert the Vietnamese. The first person, who attempted to carry out this policy was Father Alexandre de Rhodes in the 17th century. Father de Rhodes admitted that the then Vietnamese Government in the North was very hospitable and treated him cordially. He also admitted that they, the Vietnamese, allowed him to build his home and his church near the King's palace and generously provided him with assistance in his missionary work. However the kind hospitality of the Vietnamese people did not satisfy this international adventurous foreign missionary. Father de Rhodes aimed not to bring peace to the hearts of people living in the area but rather to acquire worldly power. In order to achieve this objective, Father de Rhodes conspired with the French to provide enough mercenaries to take over Indochina and to subjugate these countries to the Vatican. He believed France to be the most obedient Catholic country in the world and, therefore, easily convinced. He also believed that he could successfully recruit sufficient priests and bishops for the growing number of Catholic churches. On 11 September 1652, Father de Rhodes went to the Vatican to outline his strategies, and to receive the Church orders. He then went to France to lobby for the invasion of Vietnam.
France attacked Vietnam. The French rationalised their invasion with an explanation that they had to rescue the Catholic missionaries who were being persecuted by the Vietnamese Government. Yet it is well known that this reason given by the French was untrue. Historical facts maintain that Pope Innocent X and international adventurous priests, represented by Father Alexandre de Rhodes, continuously conspired with colonialist administrators in Catholic countries in Europe to use their armies and warships to invade other countries to colonise them. The Vatican then carried out its plan to manage and lead the newly colonised population. In May 1857, Bishop Pellerin met Napoleon III. He convinced the Emperor to instigate a military campaign to invade Vietnam. In November 1857, Bishop Pellerin returned to the Vatican to report to Pope Pius IX on his plan to lobby France to invade Vietnam. Bishop Pellerin's work in France at this time was praised by the Pope. On 1 September 1858, the alliance of the French and Spanish Armies, under the command of Admiral Rigault de Genouilly, attacked Da Nang. This invading army was assisted by the fifth column of the Vatican inside Vietnam. The Vatican's fifth column, who 'carried serpents home to kill their own family's domestic chickens', included three Vietnamese Catholic priests named Nguyen Hoang, Nguyen Dieu and Nguyen Truong To. These Vietnamese betrayers received orders from Father Croc, Bishop Gauthier and Bishop Pellerin. Thus the Vatican's conspiracy to take over Vietnam was achieved, 200 years after it was first organised, when the French landed.
This is the accurate picture of those who were in the vanguard of the Holy War the Vatican waged in Vietnam in its goal of breaking the resistance of the people by isolating them from the Asian community, by splitting Vietnam into three parts and aiming to convert North Vietnam first into a France colony followed by the Central and the South.
In 1954, Pope Pius XII continued to support the US lobby, advocating 'an atomic preventive War'. When the U. S. army planned a nuclear attack on the Vietnamese besieging the French at Dien Bien Phu, the Vatican again supported lobby and gave their approval of the proposal. During the Eisenhower administration, when the Dulles brothers and Cardinal Spellman and thus, Pius XII helped to formulate U.S. policies, the U.S considered dropping from one to six 30 kiloton bombs on the Vietnamese forces. These weapons were three times as powerful as the Hiroshima bomb. The scheme to use nuclear weapons was disclosed in the declassified Vietnam War published in 1984 in the first volume of the 17 volume official history of the declassified Vietnam War published 1in 1984 by the Army's Historical Office. Thus, nobody can deny the fact.
In the same year, 1954, the Vatican and Cardinal F. Spellman launched a campaign to bring Ngo Dinh Diem, a Catholic, to become the first president of South Vietnam. During the time under his rule, from 1955 to 1960, at least 24,000 political detainees were wounded, 80,000 were executed or otherwise murdered; 275,000 had been detained or interrogated and about 500,000 were sent to concentration camps. These figures could be greater if we counted the victims until the end of 1963 when Diem's regime collapsed.
During the two Vietnam Wars. at least 5 million people died (among which approximately 2 million died of starvation in 1945), numerous houses and farms were destroyed. Culturally, economically, politically and socially - the lives of Vietnamese had been turned upside down.
Your Holiness,
We wish to refresh your memory of those dark oppressive days by referring to a popular saying in our country:
The black robe of the religious hierarchy's spreading a morbid shadow all over the Vietnam nation.
Seducing some millions of Vietnamese to become quislings in the name of evangelization.
As a Pole by birth, you are able to identify closely with the sufferings and shame that the Polish people have suffered under foreign domination since the 10th century. Thus we hope that you can identify with our feelings and the feeling of our ancestors from the day the French colonialists first invaded our land. We feel equally certain you will acknowledge our sufferings at the hands of Catholic ideology and practices.
We see little evidence that the Vatican has done little if anything on behalf of the well being of the Vietnamese people today. Yet you have seen fit to beatify the lives and deaths of many of our colonial opponents in the name of Catholic sainthood. We believe your decision to sanctify these men who to us were fifth columnists for the French is, in reality, a political move disguised as reward for piety.
Arbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa once summed up the sufferings that Afro-Asian people had to endure under combined religious and colonial oppression as follows: 'We had land, they had only the Bible. We believed them, closing our eyes, we prayed with the Bible in our hands. When we opened our eyes, we had only the Bible while they had all the land'.
This is not the full story however because when the Afro-Asian new converts opened their eyes, they did indeed find themselves holding a Bible in one hand but in the other they held the gun that killed their own people.
Your Holiness,
Every year you make at least one overseas pilgrimage to appeal for world peace and international understanding. But we believe that the Vatican really desires to open the floodgate for a new wave of crusades in order to restore and rebuild Catholicism in Africa and Asia. In 1975 the Vatican had to flee Vietnam together with the American forces. Now the Vatican wants to come back there, but in what capacity? Do you want to carry the cross again in the Gogoltha Road where during the past two centuries the Vatican supported colonialists in exploiting Vietnam?
In 1954 many Vietnamese Catholics left en masse for the South because Colonel Edward Lansdale, as a special American Emissary, tried everything to create a Catholic country, as opposed to the Communist State in the North. 'Christ has gone to the South' or 'The Virgin Mary has departed from the North', were terms popularly used to describe Lansdale's strategy. Once moving South instead of contributing to the national development, the Vietnamese Catholics wanted to build more churches and to protect them at all costs on the pretext that they would rather lose the country than lose Catholicism. When the country was 'lost' in 1975, Vietnamese Catholics fled overseas and attempted to establish Catholic ghettos there. But local Catholic churches would never allow them to do that even though the Church in the West has been in a state of decline. However since in the West the number of priests has declined and women have not been allowed ordination, so the Vietnamese priests have begun to gain a substantial role in local churches and Catholic circles.
Christianity has declined in the West and church attendance have fallen. The most regular church goers now are non-Caucasian Catholics, particularly Vietnamese and South Americans. The Vatican could have tried to help these Catholics to start a new life and to integrate into their new countries. Instead the Vatican has tried to use them to restore its influence in Vietnam by transforming them into pressure groups and manipulating them as bargaining chips with the Vietnamese government. Your proposed visit to Vietnam is being disguised as a campaign for Human Rights . In reality it has a different covert purpose, we believe.
The intense focus of the Vatican makes the Vietnamese Catholics overseas believe that the Catholic Church and Your Holiness are going to achieve another political miracle as happened in Hungary in 1956, in the Czech Republic in 1968 and in Poland in 1979, which triggered the collapse of the socialist system 10 years later.
These fanatical Vietnamese Catholics, loyal to the Vatican, have been agents de provocateur within the Vietnamese communities overseas. They have tried to manipulate cultural, social and political activities to incite violence inside Vietnam to overthrow the government. They do not hesitate to use all means to achieve their ultimate goal of restoring Catholic power and influence in Vietnam. They have also engaged in a campaign to rewrite and distort history praising those who co-operated with colonialists such as Nguyen Truong To, Truong Vinh Ky, President Ngo Dinh Diem and Ngo Dinh Nhu, he who brutally suppressed the Vietnamese Buddhists in 1963. These fanatical Catholics have also persecuted others who hold different views from theirs and those who have refused to be intimidated by Catholic propaganda..
Your Holiness is the temporal Head of the Catholic and Polish Church. As such we ask you to spend some time studying Vietnamese history so as to better understand how much suffering our people have had to bear as a result of Catholic colonialists. We hope you are well versed in our history, both under colonialism and after 1975 when our people were scattered to the four corners of the world to seek refuge and new life.
If your proposed visit goes ahead as planned, we trust that this open letter will reach you. We hope after reading it you will take steps to amend the wrongs of the past, to improve future relations between the Vatican and the Vietnamese people, between the Catholic minority and the majority of the Vietnamese people. We respectfully ask that you:
In a true spirit of reconciliation and good heart we therefore respectfully ask that you do the following:
Apologize to the Vietnamese people for Catholic Church's past wrongdoings.
Compensate such victims of the Vietnam War where the Vatican willingly aided the aggressors.
Return Buddhist temples confiscated by French colonialists and transformed into Catholic churches including Bao Thien Pagoda in Hanoi, and La Vang Pagoda (which was now known as La Vang) in Quang Tri.
Cease denial of basic human rights including practice of death bed conversions, Catholic conversion in mixed marriages in which a spouse is a non-Catholic.
Recognize the autonomous status of the Vietnamese Catholic Church, so opening a way for the Vietnamese Catholics to live co-operatively and peacefully with their compatriots, instead of living in isolation from the rest of the Vietnamese people and denying their Vietnamese heritage.
Your Holiness.
If you love and revere Poland, land of your birth as much as we love our nation, Vietnam, you will understand the importance to us of your willingness to respond to our requests.
May Peace and Good Heart prevail.
Date: June 1st 1999
The Principal Representative:
Retired General Hoanh Linh Do Mau
From Representatives of Vietnamese Buddhist Council including:
America: Hoanh Linh Do Mau, Tran Trong Phuc, Le Trong Van, Tran Duc Viet, Nguyen Kha, Nguyen Thai.
Australia: Hoang Nguyen Nhuan, Quan Nhu and Chuyen Luan Review.
Canada: Pham Huu Dieu
France: Phan Tan Hanh , Nguyen Luong.
Copies to:
The Secretary General of the United Nations
The U. N. Human Rights Commission
The Government of Vietnam
Their Excellencies Presidents and Parliamentary Members of the U.S.A., France, Russia, Italy, Mexico
The Prime-Minister and Parliamentary Members of the Australian Parliament.
The Governments of India, Japan, Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, Spain, Portugal.
Religious Leaders
Media