Information service of the Pontifical Mission Societies since 1927
Vatican City (Agenzia Fides) - “A luminous witness of unity and forgiveness, of justice and peace, forged by the suffered experience of prison lived in union with Christ crucified and under the maternal protection of Mary”: this is how the prayer for his beatification describes the heroic figure of Vietnamese Cardinal François-Xavier Nguyen Van Thuan, president of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, commemorated at his title church, Santa Maria della Scala in Trastevere, on Sunday 16 September five years to the day since his saintly death in 2002 after a long painful illness.
His amiable person and his ministry as a bishop through which he irradiated in the Church and the world the light of the faith, the enthusiasm of hope and the warmth of charity were recalled with deep emotion by the late Cardinal's successor Cardinal Renato R. Martino, who presided the concelebration of the Eucharist with the participation of the staff of the Pontifical Council, representatives of the San Matteo Foundation in Memory of Cardinal Van Thuan, and of the Osservatorio Internazionale Cardinal Van Thuan for the Social Doctrine of the Church, family members and friends and members of the Vietnamese community in Rome.
Cardinal Martino who appointed a woman lawyer Silvia Monica Correale as postulator of the late Cardinal's cause for canonisation, underlined three aspects of his predecessor's complex personality. First of all intense love for Christ crucified, of whom he bore the image he himself had fashioned while detained 13 years unjustly in Vietnamese prisons. Secondly his dedication to the Church expressed in his intense Eucharistic piety and faithful service as a priest and a bishop crowned by wise, farsighted and active guidance at the head of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace. Thirdly his concern and readiness to help others which conquered the hearts of all those with whom he came into contact, beginning with his prison guards to the most recent of “spiritual children”. The confident trust in God and loving acceptance of His will demonstrated during the long painful illness which led to his death, set the seal on his holy life which now awaits the official recognition of the Church. (S.L.) (Agenzia Fides 17/9/2007 - Righe 26; Parole 363)
