HO CHI MINH CITY: 6th October 2005 -- While running these
brief series on the life of the Church in Vietnam, it may be of
interest to take a likewise brief look at the youth ministry scene
there. As these overviews are indeed brief, and summary, they
obviously cannot deal with matters in great detail, but be assured they
are very much up-to-date, from reliable sources in
situ.
From a positive perspective, Vietnamese youth (in
Vietnam) still respond to, live within the moral tradition of their
family upbringing, and here we are speaking especially of Catholic
youngsters. In society, generally speaking, Vietnamese youth live
still within traditional economic structures; they are hard-working,
diligent and eager to grow. Vietnamese families are still
somewhere at the mid-point between being large and being
'nuclear'. The larger families are in the countryside, whereas
the smaller ones are more likely to be found in the urban areas.
Overall, Vietnam's socialist government restricts the negative
influence of Western lifestyles insofar as
it controls access to movies, Internet games. It could be said
that young people from the countryside are still naive by comparison
with their Western counterparts - a naivety that can be viewed
positively.
That being said, it is not all rosy. In large
cities, there is the evident phenomena of growing numbers of young
people attracted to consumerist, individualistic lifestyles. And
just as evident are numbers who are addicted to drugs, alcohol, or who
engage in promiscuous lifestyles. Again, in the city, and in line
with government policy regarding planned parenthood, clinics offer free
services to pregnant women. The number of young adolescent
females attending this clinics is alarming.
Inequality of development between city and
countryside is now much more noticeable. Large numbers of young
villagers flock to the cities in search of employment, to support their
families back in the village. In this sense they become uprooted,
family bonds weaken, and they are 'adrift'. Many foreign
companies offer jobs to young women, girls, usually in textile and
clothing manufacturing. This very high resultant disproportion
between male and female in the workplace (2% and 98% respectively)
gives rise to a number of social evils. Freedom from family,
supervision, and the attraction of loose lifestyles has meant
increasing numbers of children born out of wedlock, cohabitation and
the like. Add to that an education inspired by non or worse
anti-religious sentiments, and children coming out of elementary and
junior high schools have already gained some 'proficiency' in cheating,
manipulation, self-calculation and so on.
Interesting, in the light of the above to look at
the Church's response. The parish works well in the traditional
setting where new lifestyle trends have not yet disturbed the
pattern. But in the big cities, those traditional structures do
not seem to be enough to protect the young. Parish choirs,
catechist groups, youth leadership groups attract just a few.
Workers, students, migrant youngsters seem unfamiliar with these
structures. If uprooted youngsters are still coming to Mass, then
Church attendance appears to be all the Church offers - but their
attendance is more due to family tradition than to personal conviction
nourished by catechesis, so (like many other parts of the world, one
has to add!) they stand at the back or just outside, chatting.
And that's 'going to Mass'. For the Church's part, a sense of
being 'missionary' amongst Vietnam's 7-8% young Catholic population
seems largely non-existent.
A final comment: general collaboration with those
working for the young would appear to be more an individual thing than
a planned, communal collaborative venture, even and maybe especially
with government.
VOCABULARY
in situ: Latin, for in the place, on the
spot
insofar as: expression meaning to the
extent that. Another version is inasmuch as..
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