The residence of the archbishop of Ho Chi Minh City – an ancient colonial mansion in whose grounds one can also find the city’s oldest building – is an oasis of peace amid the constant roar of the motorbikes filling the streets of the city that was once known as Saigon, reports The Tablet.
But visitors arriving there cannot fail to notice the slogan written on a 10-metre-long banner hanging just across the road, on the wall of the local People Committee’s headquarters: “The party, the people and the army actively respond to the campaign: ‘Study and follow the moral examples of Ho Chi Minh’”.
It is a stark reminder that Vietnam, despite recent economic progress and a breakthrough in its relationship with the Vatican, is still a Communist country.
Just like the small flags bearing a hammer-and-sickle symbol on street corners, that is something that the absent-minded traveller might easily overlook among the neon shop-signs and street-vendor stalls lining the city’s avenues.
Vietnam has a vibrant economy – growing at around 7 per cent per year in the last 10 years – after business-friendly reforms in the past decades.
But, just like China, political freedom has not come with greater economic freedom.
Nevertheless, there is no denying that the Catholic Church – with around eight million members, or around 9 per cent of the population – has gained from the country’s relative opening up to the outside world, and that its freedom has increased in recent years.
“If we compare today’s situation with the past there are improvements. In the past, if we wanted to receive new seminarians, or to ordain new priests, we had to apply for official permission. Now we don’t, and we can transfer priests from parish to parish freely and so on,” Mgr Peter Nguyen Van Kham, an auxiliary bishop in Ho Chi Minh City, told me recently.