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The Fighting Fathers
The Fighting Fathers
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- Aug, 11 , 24
The upcoming book The Fighting Fathers by Alessandro Giorgi provides a history of the CIA’s attempt to support and organize armed resistance to the Vietcong in South Vietnam around Catholic priests and their parishes.
Catholics are a relatively small minority in Vietnam, less than 10% of the population. Today there are likely six to eight million Catholics in Vietnam, which sounds like a lot, but this is a country with more than 100 million people.
Beyond the general antipathy between religion and communism, many South Vietnamese Catholics had a deeper-rooted aversion to communism and the Vietcong insurgency. An interesting aspect of the conflict, pointed out by Giorgi in his book, is that a large portion of the Catholic populace in the South were recent immigrants, who had been compelled to flee from Communist countries.
The most famous (at least in the West) of the Catholic militia groups in the South were known as the Sea Swallows. The leader of the Sea Swallows, Father Hóa, along with the core of his parish and militia, was actually Chinese, having escaped from China in 1950, where Hóa had been under house arrest for more than a year.
A much-larger group of refugees were from North Vietnam. As the French colonial regime unraveled over the course of the early 1950s, hundreds of thousands of civilians fled the Communist North. By 1955, more than 860,000 refugees traveled from North to South Vietnam, more than 670,000 of whom were Catholic. Additionally, well over 100,000 veterans of the defeated French colonial army went to the South, a large portion being Catholic.
By 1964, there were only about 830,000 Catholics remaining in North Vietnam, indicating that at least around half the North Vietnamese Catholic population had immigrated to the South between 1950 and 1964.
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