http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20061118/ap_on_re_as/apec_vietnam_religion

HANOI, Vietnam - They file into St. Anthony's Catholic Church to pray and take communion in the early morning darkness, before the city rumbles with motorbikes and commerce.
Crossing themselves and chanting liturgy, they look at ease — even though their homeland, Vietnam, shunned Catholics until not long ago and has come under sustained international criticism for violations of religious freedom.

President Bush plans to pray at a church much like this one during his visit to Hanoi for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit this weekend. The church stop is intended as a show of support for Vietnam's faithful, who live under a communist government that tightly controls religious institutions.
While restrictions remain, harassment has eased enough that the United States decided this week to remove Vietnam from a list of the world's worst violators of religious freedom. For members of Vietnam's six officially sanctioned faiths — including Catholicism — the stigma that communist leaders once attached to their expressions of faith had long before all but disappeared.

For several years, temples and churches across the country have been packed with the faithful, with even communist officials now taking part in religious ceremonies.

At St. Anthony's, the four Sunday Masses draw 1,500 to 2,000 people each. Worshippers overflow the pews and spill onto the sidewalk, where they sit on plastic chairs and listen to Mass on loudspeakers.

On weekdays at 6 a.m., several hundred of the most devout of the church's 7,500 members show up, parking bicycles and motorbikes in a courtyard filled with statues of the Virgin Mary.

Nguyen Van Thuan has been coming to St. Anthony's since it was built in 1934, but was afraid to come from the mid-1950s until the late 1980s, when the government began implementing reform policies known as doi moi and acknowledged that religion was a "tradition of the people."

"Only people who were really devoted dared to come here at that time," said the 84-year-old Thuan, dressed in a derby, gray suit and tie. "I feel very comfortable here now."

Nguyen Anh Tuan, 49, who grew up in a home behind the church, said he was turned down for a government job in the 1970s because he identified himself as a Catholic.

"Ten years ago, people discriminated against me for coming here, but not anymore," Tuan said. "The atmosphere is very open now, not just for Catholics but for everyone."

If things have opened up for ordinary Catholics, the Vietnamese government continues to place restrictions on the church hierarchy, limiting the number of priests it can train, churches it can build or seminaries it can open.

All of the six officially approved faiths are overseen by the Communist Party. Buddhism is dominant, followed by Catholicism.

Some Catholic and Protestant denominations, however, have refused to accept communist control.

Criticism of Vietnam's record on religious freedom usually involves members of such unapproved churches, including the independent Unified Buddhist Church of Vietnam.

While the U.S. decided that Vietnam's treatment of such groups has improved in the past year, Human Rights Watch, a New York-based group, issued a report this week saying that Vietnam's record on religious freedom remains poor.

St. Anthony's 50-year-old priest, Father Joseph Maria Vu Thanh Canh, refuses to discuss the politics of religion in Vietnam; he will only discuss his own parish. "We have a fulfilling religious life," he said.

Maybe Catholicism would have been more widely accepted in Vietnam had Ngo Dinh Diem openly persecuted the 80% of the Vietnamese population that was Buddhist, much like Saddam persecuted the majority Shiite population in Iraq. Diem pushed back the religion a lot of years by his actions.

And he wondered why nobody liked him and he was executed along with his family in a coup.