Fr. Roger J. Landry
Putting Out Into the Deep
The Anchor
September 14, 2007
This Sunday, September 16, marks the fifth anniversary of the death of Cardinal François-Xavier Nguyên Van Thuân, the heroic Archbishop of Saigon who for the Gospel spent 13 years in Communist prisons, including 9 years of solitary confinement.
After his release, he was exiled to Rome, where he became the President of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace. It was there, during my years as a seminarian and a baby priest, that I got to know him over several unforgettable dinners with a mutual priest friend. Sitting across from him for hours, I was able to learn from his own lips the moving testimony of his saintly life.
He was appointed the coadjutor Archbishop of Saigon only days before South Vietnam fell to the Communists. The Communists did not wait long to arrest him for the sole reason; they wanted to strike the shepherd in order to scatter the sheep. They rushed him to the North under the cover of darkness, eventually bringing him, in various types of dank vessels, over 1100 miles from his flock. He was assigned to mountainous “re-education camps,” the euphemism for prisons that specialized in mental torture, where the guards tried to break him and others down any way they could.
Since Van Thuân not only personally resisted this brainwashing but by his example was inoculating his “parishioners” — the other starving, desperate prisoners — he was assigned to isolation chambers. He lived for years in a windowless room that was so hot and had so little air that many days he thought he would suffocate. His only light came from a small hole for water to escape at the bottom corner of a wall. He would spend hours with his nose against the hole just trying to breathe. The room was so damp and filthy that mushrooms grew on his sleeping mat. To keep his arthritis in check he would to walk from one side of the room to the other, trying not to step on the army of millipedes, earthworms and spiders with whom he had to share his tiny space. He did all he could to keep from going insane due to lack of light and human contact for weeks on end.
He began to wonder why the Lord would allow him to remain in that situation. He was only 48 when he was arrested, with eight years of episcopal experience, and the people of his Archdiocese really needed their leader. How much more good he could do for God, he reasoned, if he were released. What good could he do in solitary confinement?
That’s when the Lord helped him to see just what meaning his life could still have, even in the midst of what seemed to be a totally hopeless situation. In prayer he reflected on the lasting fruits St. Paul bore by writing letters from jail and asked the Lord to give him the same opportunity.
The Lord heard the prayer. A 7 year old boy named Quang would walk by his cell very early each morning. Van Thuân called him over, discovered that he was a Catholic, revealed who he was, and asked him to have his parents send him some paper. Each morning they would send Quang with old newspapers. The exiled Archbishop would scribble one or two spiritual thoughts on them over the course of the day and give them to the boy the following morning. The boy would bring the notes to his parents, who copied them into a book. Van Thuân recognized that he could not do much, but, like the young boy with the five loaves and two fish in the Gospel (Jn 6), he would give the Lord all he had that day and allow the Lord, if he wished, to multiply the offering. The Lord did. Eventually the spiritual aphorisms were published secretly in a book entitled “The Road to Hope,” a spiritual classic which has inspired Vietnamese Catholics to remain faithful their persecution.
How did he celebrate Mass? Since he was arrested without any time to pack, his family was able to send him toothpaste, soap, clothes and other supplies. He wrote them asking them never to forget to send his “stomach medicine,” a code word they properly interpreted as a request to send some wine in a bottle labeled “stomach medicine,” and conceal some crumbs of bread among the other necessities. He would put a few crumbs on his hand, three drops of wine and one drop of water, and each mid-afternoon he would renew the “eternal covenant” with Jesus, mixing Jesus’ blood with his own.
At his funeral Mass, Pope John Paul II referred to him as an “heroic herald of Christ’s Gospel,” “a shining example of Christian loyalty to the point of martyrdom,” and “faithful to the end” — all words that did not hide the pope’s appreciation for Van Thuân’s obvious holiness. Five years after his death, his cause for canonization is about to open.
May his example of giving the Lord the best he could in the most trying of circumstances inspire all of us to give the Lord our five loaves and two fish, too.