The Disquieted Americans

The Holy See was at Tanyin. A pope and female cardinals. Prophecy by planchette. Saint Victor Hugo. Christ and Buddha looking down from the roof of the cathedral on a Walt Disney fantasia of the East, dragons and snakes in Technicolor.

Thus tersely, in his bestselling The Quiet American, Novelist Graham Greene described Cao Daism, a gaudy gallimaufry of Buddhism, Confucianism and Christianity whose followers number at least one million and play a significant part in the confused politics of South Viet Nam.

Hollywood Magic. Like Greene's naive hero himself, few Americans are capable of understanding the devious ramifications of Cao Dai, and it is doubtful if their number includes Hollywood Producer Joe Mankiewicz. On location in South Viet Nam to film the Greene novel, his concern was simply to get a good shot of the Holy See at festival time. Cao Dai's Pope Pham Cong Tac was in Cambodian exile when Mankiewicz arrived, having deemed it wise to flee the country after some trouble with the government last year concerning his Vestal Virgins, but Vice Pope Bao The was more than glad to oblige.

"There will be no need to prepare anything," he told Mankiewicz. "Just come with your cameras and film our annual procession." Last week, trailed by a motorcade bearing some 50 technicians and actors, all well-armed with pith helmets, salt tablets and quinine pills, Mankiewicz journeyed to Tayninh. Meanwhile, prompted to some extent by the wishful thinking of the exile himself, word had spread among the Cao Dai faithful that Hollywood magic had somehow arranged for the return to Tayninh of Pope Tac.

As the festival began, all was sweetness, light and color. The cameras ground away. Vestal Virgins, bishops, boy scouts and cardinals of both sexes thronged together in full ecclesiastic panoply on the great Square of the Universe. There were speeches and playlets and prayers. "Our dear Pope is not here," said Vice Pope Bao The, "but his spirit is among us." Then, quite suddenly, the crowd turned hostile.

"We want our Pope," they shouted in Vietnamese, shaking their fists in the faces of the bewildered Americans. As the clamor rose, the Vestal Virgins whipped out huge banners bearing the same demand in English. "This is not religious," muttered one bewildered movieman. "This looks political to me." But he kept his cameras grinding. At last, as suddenly as it had begun, the disturbance was over, and the frenzied crowd disappeared from the square, leaving behind them a cloud of yellow dust kicked up by the stamping of thousands of frantic feet.

The Disillusioned. Next day, when the moviemen returned from Saigon to shoot some final scenes inside the Cao Dai cathedral, they discovered that the Vice Pope and his staff had departed for points unknown. Those Cao Daists who remained refused to have anything further to do with moviemaking.

Some 40 miles away in Bentre, a dissident group of 20,000 disillusioned Cao Daists, accepting at last the fact that the old Pope was gone for good and that even Hollywood could not bring him back, sat down in a grove of coconut trees and elected a new Pope.

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