Nhung Tuyet Tran
This study examines how an existential crisis over confession in a North Vietnamese Catholic community prompted local believers to send men of no particular importance across the Indian Ocean and around the African continent to Europe, where they were fêted by Louis XIV in Paris and Innocent XI in Rome. These travelers went on this mission to demand the duties owed them from European religious and secular leaders. My project suggests that the cosmopolitan itineraries of these three catechists triggered the second rites controversy in China, and globally, in 1693. It is a study of how Catholicism as lived and practiced in Vietnam reshaped the global church in the early modern era and how the demands and actions of Vietnamese believers force us to rethink the field of “Global Catholicism.”