About 350 Vietnamese Roman Catholics, including more than 100 priests, met in Hanoi on Tuesday for a congress of the Catholic Church in Vietnam.

The meeting, which was last held in 1993, took place under the auspices of the Fatherland Front, a Communist umbrella organisation which controls all social and religious groups in Vietnam.

The Vietnamese Catholic population of about seven million is the second largest in Asia after the Philippines, but as Henry Tang reports, some observers doubt che Congress can help resolve the tensions between the Church and the Vietnamese authorities.

The meeting is officially entitled `The Congress of Patriotic Vietnamese Catholics Who Construct and Protect the Nation'.

This description is important because the ruling Communist Party has traditionally regarded the Catholic population as a pro-western minority which owes greater allegiance to the Vatican than to Hanoi.

Feelings of suspicion between the Church and the authorities intensified in the southern province of Dong Nai earlier this year when Catholics staged a series of violent protests over land rights.

The protesters were aggrieved when local officials decided to sell land which had been confiscated from the Church.

The Vietnamese government is hoping the two-day congress will show it has a tolerant attitude towards Catholics who are prepared to co-operate with the communist state.

But Father Bernardo Cervellera of the Vatican News Agency, FIDES, says the congress is simply not representative of the overwhelming majority of Catholics in Vietnam.

Fr Cervellera said the Vietnamese authorities could only show genuine respect for the Catholic Church by ending restrictions on Catholic organisations outside the state.

The Vatican is hoping to restart negotiations with Hanoi on what it regards as its right to choose its own bishops.

Talks on this issue, which began in 1989, broke down four years later when the Vietnamese government vetoed a Vatican appointment for Bishop of Ho Chi Minh City.

The state-sponsored Catholics meeting will probably say they are satisfied with their role in Vietnamese society.