Catholic Marriage and the Customs of the Country: Building a New Religious Community in Seventeenth-Century Vietnam.

Catholic missionaries baptized thousands of Vietnamese in the seventeenth century. To strengthen identification with Catholicism, they encouraged converts to marry other Catholics and discouraged traditional polygyny and divorce. However, missionaries complained that Catholics continued to wed gentiles, that they divorced, and that men married multiple wives. So while missionaries celebrated large numbers of baptisms, they worried that they had failed to construct a strong boundary around their religious community. The problem was that their rules were socially disruptive. Even European Catholic countries, such as France, undermined ecclesiastical control of marriage to meet the imperatives of family formation and state building. So too in Vietnam Catholics claimed that, in marrying non-Catholics, practicing polygyny, and allowing divorce, they were only following their laws and the "customs of the country." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]