Jesuit Historiography Online

Article Table of Contents

1. The Cochinchina Mission under Jesuit Padroado (1615–65)
2. The Tonkin Mission under Jesuit Padroado (1627–63)
3. The Jesuit Missions to Vietnam under the French and Spanish Bishops (1664–1773)
4. The Jesuit Missions as Seen by French Historians during the Colonial Era
5. Back to the Archives: Jesuit and Non-Jesuit Scholarship in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries
6. The Story Continues

Anh Q. Tran, S.J.
aqtran@scu.edu
Last modified: October 2018

In contrast to the wealth of information about the Jesuits in China and Japan, the parallel story of the Jesuit presence in Vietnam has received modest scholarly attention until recent decades. Even though the Portuguese and Italian Jesuits were instrumental in establishing Christian communities in both the ancient states of Cochinchina and Tonkin that make up the present-day Vietnam, their contribution were not properly acknowledged. Part of the problem is due to the fact that prior to 1945, Vietnam was known to the Western world largely as part of French Indochina, and thus Vietnamese Catholicism was seen in the same light—as an extension of French Catholicism. For three hundred years, from the 1660s to the 1960s, the Catholic Church in Vietnam was largely under the care of the Paris Foreign Mission Society (Missions Étrangères de Paris or MEP).

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