History
The first Catholic missionaries visited Vietnam from Portugal at the beginning of the 16th century. The earliest missions did not bring very impressive results. Only after the arrival of Jesuits in the first decades of the 17th century did Christianity begin to establish its positions within the local population. Between 1627-30, Alexander de Rhodes and Antoine Marquez, priests from the region of Provence in France, converted more than 6,000 people.
In the 17th century, de Rhodes created an alphabet for the Vietnamese language, using the Latin script with added diacritic marks, based on the work of earlier Portuguese missionaries. This system continues to be used today, and is called Quốc Ngữ (literally "national language").
Read more about this topic: Roman Catholicism In Vietnam
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