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
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The view of Jerusalem is the history of the world; it is more, it is the history of earth and of heaven.”
—Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881)
“When the landscape buckles and jerks around, when a dust column of debris rises from the collapse of a block of buildings on bodies that could have been your own, when the staves of history fall awry and the barrel of time bursts apart, some turn to prayer, some to poetry: words in the memory, a stained book carried close to the body, the notebook scribbled by hand—a center of gravity.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“The history of medicine is the history of the unusual.”
—Robert M. Fresco, and Jack Arnold. Prof. Gerald Deemer (Leo G. Carroll)