My dissertation focuses on the political challenges to French rule in interwar Vietnam posed by a diverse and independent Catholic Church. It integrates the discursive, representational approaches of a cultural history of French colonialism with a rigorous examination of rarely used sources for the history of religion in interwar Vietnam, specifically missionary letters, surveillance documents of religious groups, and published Catholic texts. The dissertation's five chapters examine various groups contributing to Catholicism's political character during this period, including the Vatican, Italian and Spanish missionaries, Vietnamese bishops, American and British Protestants, and Vietnamese religions like Buddhism and Cao Dai, with the goal of developing a more thorough and more precise understanding of Catholicism's place in the French colonial empire.