Vietnam attacks Vatican ``slander'' over priests

HANOI, Jan 15 (Reuters) - Vietnam on Thursday accused the Vatican's news agency Fides of ``slander,'' saying comments that accused Hanoi of barring two Catholic priests from attending a Church Synod offended the Vietnamese government.

Foreign ministry spokeswoman Phan Thuy Thanh said it was untrue that the priests had been denied exit visas.

"There's no issue about refusing exit visas for the two priests. I must make clear these two men were not included in the list that the Catholic Bishop's Council submitted for travel procedures," she said.

Fides is the weekly news agency of the Congregation for the Evangelisation of Peoples, the Vatican's missionary arm which deals with affairs of the Roman Catholic Church in developing nations.

Fides said in a report last Monday Hanoi had refused to allow Nicolas Huynh Van Nghi, the apostolic administrator of Ho Chi Minh City, and Jean-Baptiste Phan Minh Man, coadjutor to the bishop of southern My Tho city, to attend the Asian Synod at the Vatican due in April and May.

"This slander has offended the Vietnamese Government and Vietnam Catholic Solidarity Council," Thanh said at a press briefing.

"The comments of Fides did not show goodwill and showed little understanding of Vietnam's real situation. And Fides...has rejected the contributions made by Vietnamese Catholics to our country."

The Catholic Bishops Council, like all other religious groups in communist Vietnam, is state-sanctioned.

Hanoi insists that the Vatican has no direct influence over the Vietnamese Catholic Church, and would not automatically approve Papal appointments, saying such moves are an interference in the country's internal affairs.

While the religious climate in Vietnam has eased over the last decade as the country slowly embraces reform, priests are still restricted in their movements.

Thanh defended her government's treatment of Catholics and said there were now nearly 1,000 Catholic students in the country's six seminaries. There were almost 600 ordinations over the past nine years, she said.

About eight million of Vietnam's 78 million people are Catholic, the second biggest Catholic community in Southeast Asia after the Philippines.

Tension between the church and government flared in November in southern Dong Nai province when some 3,000 Catholic villagers clashed with police over moves by the local authorities to acquire land belonging to the local church.

The controversy over the priests' inability to travel came less than two months after Hanoi said it scrapped requirements for its citizens to acquire exit visas before being allowed to go abroad.