Pro-government priests create conflicts for Church in Vietnam

May 02, 2011

"State priests"--Catholic clerics who show greater loyalty to the Communist regime than to the Church--create serious difficulties for Church leaders in Vietnam.

Three Catholic priests are running for election (in two cases, for re-election) to the National Assembly, in defiance of the canonical rule against clerical involvement in partisan politics. The National Assembly serves to enact the policies of the Communist Party.

One of the three candidate-priests, Father Phan Khac Tu, has been removed from ministry by the Saigon archdiocese. The editor of a newspaper that frequently criticized the Pope, he has claimed that he ran a bomb-making operation inside his church during the years of war against the US.

 

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Further information:

• State priests: a challenge for the Church in Vietnam (Viet Catholic)
• Three Vietnamese priests running for election to Communist ruling body (CWN, 4/27)