Saturday, December 26, 1998

Where Christmas still means Christ

By SARAH MURRAY

The Financial Times

PHAT DIEM, Vietnam -- The rock version of "Jingle Bells" comes as something of a surprise as it echoes through the dank air inside the great cathedral. I had been expecting something a little different.

After all, this is Christmas midnight mass at Phat Diem -- an event that each year draws thousands of believers from surrounding Ninh Bing province to a cathedral known as "the Vatican of Vietnam." I want incense, Latin chants and priests in flowing robes, not a song about a one-horse open sleigh.

The journey has no doubt clouded my judgment. From the consumer chaos of Hanoi's Old Quarter, it takes four hours -- in a Jeep from which more than a few screws have clearly come loose -- to reach Phat Diem in time for the service.

Signs of commercial life soon start to diminish. Roads have been successfully negotiated. I have resisted the temptation to spend my money on the hundreds of roadside stallholders who want to sell me everything from sticky rice wrapped in banana leaves to oil-covered tractor engines.

Now the countryside opens out. Rice farmers have transformed the flat terrain into what look like large lakes and from these great tracts of glassy water rise villages perched on tiny mounds of land that have managed to evade the rice planters' efforts.

Whatever impact free enterprise and foreign investment have made on Hanoi is little in evidence here -- except perhaps in the roadside cafe where we stop to eat. In this spartan establishment, bowls and chopsticks are the only table companions to throw-away cigarette lighters cleverly embedded in cement-filled Coke cans (presumably to stop someone from throwing them away). Yet, grinning at us as we tuck into our noodles, is a large poster of a woman in the traditional costume of the northern hill-tribes holding a mobile phone to her ear.

Even these rather curious reminders of modern life are disappearing as we near our destination. What is laughingly termed a highway has become a road, or what I would call a track, and in the fading evening light I catch a glimpse of my first church. Then another, and another. The place is sprinkled with Roman Catholic edifices and they are all decorated with brightly colored paper stars and crosses. I am preparing myself for what I hope will be an experience lathered in raw, rural spirituality.

This is a province where priests must be physically fit. In an uneasy relationship between an aging revolutionary leadership in Hanoi and the Vietnamese Catholic Church, the state controls clerical appointments and limits the number of students entering seminaries. Priests in Phat Diem pay the price. In short supply, they are forced every Sunday to cycle furiously from church to church, conducting mass after mass, to keep up with demand.

And demand is strong. In the diocese of Phat Diem, 90,000 of 145,000 inhabitants are practicing Catholics and the province has 137 cathedrals.

But before I can begin counting them all, we've arrived at the most important of the lot: Phat Diem. With crowds of pilgrims swirling around its base, the extraordinary structure rising into the now darkened sky is like no other cathedral I have ever seen.

Mixed in with the Christian iconography dominating the elaborately carved friezes of the exterior are palm fronds and bamboo forests. The apostles are perched on the sort of clouds normally reserved for Vietnamese emperors, and the Archangel Gabriel looks like a Thai dancer.

Completed in 1899, Phat Diem is a triumph of fusion architecture: a crucifix church plan combined with the decorative elements and curved roofs of an oriental pagoda. The genius behind this marriage of east and west was Bishop Pedro Tran Luc. Known as "Father Sau," he had hundreds of ironwood trees and 20-ton chunks of granite brought to the site and, without plans or drawings, directed the construction, mobilizing thousands of people in Phat Diem's completion.

The result is astonishing. The cathedral, four auxiliary churches and two chapels -- one built entirely of stone -- make up the complex. Great wooden roof beams are supported by huge ironwood columns that are an ingenious blend of European Gothic and the rough pillars found in Buddhist temples.

Small wonder, then, that I have been expecting something a little more solemn in tone from a mass conducted from within these hallowed walls.

It is certainly entertaining. The pop renditions of Christmas favorites are swiftly replaced by a choir trying desperately to keep pace with the electric organ that has been pre-recorded as an accompaniment. A brass band is next on the program, playing what sounds -- when they all manage to hit the right note at the same time -- like a communist military march.

Suddenly all the lights go out and we are plunged into darkness. In the hot, sticky obscurity, I start to wonder what on earth I am doing here. I was looking for enlightenment and instead I found a party. I have been jostled by crowds of teenagers, deafened by unappealing music and shocked by the brazen kitsch of a luridly colored statue of the Virgin dolled up in flashing neon. And I am not even a Catholic.

The lights go back on. I look behind me and what I see is extraordinary. A couple of thousand faces now fill the aisle and wings of the church while the giant doors at its back have been opened to reveal an ocean of worshippers. Expressions are rapt and all eyes fix on the bishop who has arrived to conduct the mass. Thousands of mouths synchronize their movements with his low Vietnamese chanting before sounding the response.

At the end of the 75-minute service, a candlelit procession begins. A model of baby Jesus -- held high on a gold and red lacquer bier that looks as if its last occupant was a Vietnamese emperor -- is taken down the aisle and out of the church to its resting place in a grotto.

The communicants follow. An impressive silence has descended. Candles flicker and everyone contemplates the nativity scene before them.

By the time people start to drift away my misgivings have melted. I am enraptured, won over by the exotic mystery of what must be one of Catholicism's more unusual outposts.

(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service.)