Francis Xavier Nguyen Van Thuan (1928-2002) was raised in a devout Vietnamese family with a memory of horrific religious persecution in the complicated history of Vietnamese Catholicism.
His grandfather’s cousin “Aunt Lien” was present when, in 1885, the Catholics of Dai Phong gathered in their church to escape a raid when the church’s bamboo roof was set ablaze. Inside, the people’s prayers were drowned by the cries of their own children. Thuan grew up hearing the stories of that night and was acutely aware that he was related to martyrs.
Thuan was ordained a priest in 1953 and obtained a doctorate in canon law in 1959. Bishop of the Vietnamese coastal city Nha Trang during the war-torn years between 1967 and 1975, he would pay a price for his faith soon afterward.
Thuan was was 39 years old in 1975 when he was appointed Archbishop of Saigon.
He was filled with hopes for growth in the seminary and plans to support parish families throughout the archdiocese, but when the city fell to the North Vietnamese communists a few months after his appointment, Thuan was seen as a threat. The North Vietnamese authorities forbade him to communicate from Giang Xa Parish (pictured above) where he was placed under house arrest.
Frustrated and alone, he noticed a daily calendar in his room and realized the back of its pages could be used to write notes of encouragement to his people. His messages were surreptitiously printed and distributed and are now gathered in The Road of Hope, a book of spiritual guidance that still consoles those who read his words.
As the Vietnam war came to a close, a much darker time awaited Thuan. The North Vietnamese placed him on a ship packed with other prisoners of war headed for a re-education camp where he spent the next 13 years. Thuan endured much of that time in solitary confinement peppered with torture.
The exiled bishop agonized as he tried to comprehend why God was allowing all his plans to fail.
As Thuan cried out to God, he received a higher understanding of his situation. “There is God’s work and then there is God,” the Lord seemed to silently say.
Alone in his cell, Thuan pictured Christ Crucified and realized that “when Jesus was most helpless, his arms and legs nailed to the cross and life draining out of his body, …he accomplished the most for humanity,” his biographer Andre Nguyen writes.
Thuan then remembered St. Thérèse of Lisieux alone in her Carmelite cell.
His mother had taught Thuan about the Little Flower when he was four years old. She too, had desired to accomplish great things for the Lord, and she died at age 24 without seeing the fruit of her sacrifice.
Thuan thought as well of his patron St. Francis Xavier entrusting his mission to Christ while dying without despair on a beach near China. Like the saints who had gone before him, Thuan resolved to offer each moment, no matter how dark, to Jesus and the Blessed Mother Mary.
Thuan’s captivity became a center of missionary action. Family members sent him wine “for a stomach ailment” and hosts hidden in a flashlight. With these he celebrated silent masses for Catholic prisoners, using his hand as a chalice. He carved a cross to keep with him at all times.
Dr. Anthony Lilles relates that Thuan “turned communist re-education camps into schools of love,” frustrating his captors as even the guards began to convert.
His captors then rotated the guards to keep them from being influenced by Thuan’s love, but God turned that plan for good too, as “more and more guards came to be touched by the gospel through their contact with the imprisoned bishop, and many received baptism from him.”
“Humiliated, mocked, threatened, beaten–sometimes it was difficult for him to utter even simple vocal prayers. Yet he was never overcome,” Lilles writes. “[Thuan] kept extending the hand of forgiveness and friendship to his tormentors. He never failed to find ways to encourage his fellow inmates. In the most difficult situations, Christ crucified gave him all he needed and he learned to rely on Him alone.”
Through his personal Gethsemane in captivity, Thuan came to deeply understand what St. Thérèse had discovered a century before him:
God asks only to be loved moment by moment. Each little renunciation of our own will allows us to embrace Christ more and more fully.
Thuan was eventually released from prison, but his captors would not let him return home. He lived for a time with family members in Australia but then went to Rome, where he would become vice-president and then president of the Pontifical Commission for Justice and Peace. During that time he oversaw the compilation the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, a gathering of social teaching “which concerns the whole person and is addressed to all people.”
In our fragmented political culture, people of all beliefs can gain much from the Compedium’s wisdom. But closer to home, we can pray for grace to make our own places of work and rest schools of love.
“To choose God and not God’s works,” Thuan resolves in Five Loaves and Two Fish. “God wants me here and nowhere else….I choose you, your will; I am your missionary here.” And so are we, if we unite our desire to Thuan’s words.
In the loneliness of our lives, when the works we dream of doing for God escape us, Thuan’s words can sustain the heart. Wherever we are, whether sick and alone or harried by busy duties, we can extend friendship and forgiveness in the spirit of Christ in Gethsemane. Our lives are never as solitary as they sometimes seem.
Thuan’s “solitary” confinement truly was a re-education, but not in the way his captors intended. The love Thuan vowed to live reverberated through the world. Known for his peaceful presence and constant words of hope, his life shows us that God cannot be outdone when we seek to love him with each small moment of our lives.
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You might also enjoy Francis Xavier Nguyen Van Thuan’s Beatitudes for a Political Leader and Luther and the Little Way: A Gradual Gift from a Catholic Conversion.
See Post-1975 Tragedy: The Grim Reality of Life in Vietnam’s Re-education Camps for a graphic realization of what Thuan’s captivity was really like.
Featured photo by Hoangvantoanajc – CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons. Thuan’s family photo by unknown photographer, Public Domain, Wikimedia Commons.
Very inspiring, beautifully done and so informative.
Thank you so much Tim, Thuan inspires me deeply so I’m glad he did that for you too! He has been declared a Servant of God. 🙏 What a grace to think of our own places as schools of love. May they quietly flourish for Christ.