An Apostle of Hope

Word Among Us, Apr 2005 by French, Bob

Francis Xavier Nguyen Van Thuan

The Communist interrogator couldn't stand it any longer. "Admit it!" he shouted to the priest, "You're part of a Vatican plot! You're nothing more than an Imperialist lackey!" But the newly appointed archbishop of Saigon, Francis Xavier Nguyen Van Thuan, answered quietly and directly, "No. I will not admit anything of the kind."

Thuan was placed under immediate arrest. The date was August 15, 1975, the Feast of the Assumption. For the next thirteen years, he would be imprisoned and would undergo terrible suffering in body, mind, and spirit. But God would use that ordeal to transform Thuan into an apostle of hope, a man whose life proclaimed the triumph of the gospel of Christ over the despair and confusion of atheism and materialism.

Preparing for Suffering. Clearly, God had been preparing Thuan for this calling. Growing up in the Vietnamese city of Hue in the 1930s, he learned the value of sacrifice from his family. All were devout Catholics who had persevered in their faith despite intense persecution. They also believed that serving their country was a duty. Many of the men were prominent leaders who would play an important role in the future of Vietnam-including his mentor, Uncle Diem, who became the country's first prime minister.

For his part, Thuan decided to serve others by becoming a priest. He entered the seminary when he was only thirteen and was deeply inspired by the holiness of the priests who taught him there. Reading the lives of saints like Thérèse of Lisieux, John Vianney, and Francis Xavier also fueled his growing desire to become like Christ.

During these formative years, Thuan grappled with the reality of suffering and death on more than one occasion. In 1945, while he was still in the seminary, the Communists executed his uncle Khoi and Khoi's son. Soon after his ordination in 1953, Thuan himself came close to death when he contracted tuberculosis; his parents prayed for him constantly, and he was miraculously cured. Then in 1963, after the Communists had taken Vietnam from the French, Thuan was struck a much harder blow when his maternal uncles Diem and Can were both assassinated by the Viet Cong.

It was a great struggle for Thuan to forgive his uncles' killers. What helped him, he later said, was the example of his mother, whose courageous faith gave her the strength to accept these tragedies. Before Diem's assassination, she told Thuan, "It is in God's hands. We should pray for his safety, but we must also be ready to accept God's will." Her tranquility was a tremendous witness.

Thuan was also deeply devoted to another mother-the Virgin Mary. While studying in Rome in 1957, he took a trip to Lourdes, France. There he reflected on Mary's words to St. Bernadette: "I do not promise you joys and consolations on this earth, but rather trials and sufferings." Thuan sensed that these words were meant for him. He replied with a prayer: "For your son's name and yours, Mary, I accept trials and sufferings."

And so, when he was arrested on the Feast of the Assumption, 1975, Thuan knew that he was in God's hands.

Decision to Love. Nevertheless, Thuan was very distressed. "My heart is torn to pieces for having been taken away from my people," he wrote the next day. He had served them for more than two decades. For the last eight years, as bishop of Nha Trang province, he had labored to strengthen parishes and ministries, build new seminaries, and ordain new priests. He had headed a huge relief effort for four million refugees displaced by over a quarter century of war. Now it seemed that his pastoral work had come to an end.

Soon after being taken into custody, however, Thuan determined to persevere. He vowed to himself: "I am not going to wait. I will live each present moment, filling it to the brim with love." He realized that he could continue to shepherd his people by adopting St. Paul's strategy of writing pastoral letters from prison. He wrote a series of inspirational messages on the backs of calendar pages that were smuggled out and eventually published as a book, The Road of Hope.

When his captors got wise to this, they put Thuan in solitary confinement in a narrow, poorly lit, and windowless cell. It was so hard to breathe in there that he sometimes had to put his nose near the bottom of the cell door in order to get any air. After a few months, Thuan felt completely useless and even thought he was losing his mind. At times, he could not remember so much as a "Hail Mary."

A New Way of Thinking. One day, however, Thuan had a life-changing insight. He understood that Jesus, too had appeared "useless" as he hung on the cross. But it was when he appeared the most powerless that he achieved his most "useful" accomplishment: He saved the whole human race. Thuan heard the Lord say to him: "It is me you are supposed to be following, not my work! If I will it, you will finish the work entrusted to you." This realization "brought me a new strength that completely changed my way of thinking," Thuan later explained.