Top photo caption: Venerable Fulton J. Sheen is pictured in an undated file photo. The beatification of Archbishop Sheen will take place on Sept. 24, 2026, in St. Louis, where he will become the first American-born bishop to be beatified. OSV News photo/Library of Congress
By Courtney Mares, OSV News
ROME OSV News — Shortly after Venerable François-Xavier Nguyen Van Thuan was ordained a priest in Vietnam in June 1953, his younger sister walked into a confessional without realizing her own brother was the one sitting behind the screen.
More than seven decades later, as the Catholic Church marks the 24th anniversary of the Vietnamese cardinal’s death Sept. 16, that unexpected encounter remains one of the most treasured memories of him held by his younger sister, Élisabeth Nguyen Thi Thu Hong, and one that forever changed the way she approaches the sacrament of confession.
“I didn’t know that he was behind the confessional booth, so I went to confession and it was him,” Nguyen Thi Thu Hong, who is 22 years younger than her brother, said in an interview with OSV News earlier this year. Recognizing his voice, she asked him whether he planned to tell their parents what she confessed.
She said she will never forget then-Father Van Thuan’s answer, “When I’m behind this with my stole, I am Jesus. So you can tell Jesus all the things you want.”
“That was my very, very beautiful moment with him,” she said.
She also recalled an earlier memory, from before her brother’s ordination, when he babysat her as a child. Walking together in a garden, he told her he was soon to become a priest and asked what she could do to help him become a good one. She promised to pray for him. Little did she know at the time how much her brother would need her prayers in the decades to come.
Cardinal Van Thuan, who has been declared venerable by the Catholic Church and is on the path to sainthood, is known for heroically enduring 13 years of imprisonment under Vietnam’s communist government. He was arrested on Aug. 15, 1975, four months after Pope Paul VI named him coadjutor archbishop of Saigon, now Ho Chi Minh City. He was held without trial or sentence, spending nine years in solitary confinement and four more in re-education camps.
During his imprisonment, he secretly celebrated Mass in the palm of his hand, using smuggled hosts and wine sent to him in small bottles labeled “medicine for stomach ache.” He wrote brief spiritual reflections on scraps of paper that were copied by hand and circulated among Vietnamese Catholics; they were later collected into the book “The Road of Hope.”
Born April 17, 1928, in Phú Cam in the Archdiocese of Hue, Van Thuan was the second of nine children in a family with a history of Christian martyrs. In 1967, he became the first Vietnamese bishop of Nha Trang. After his release from prison in 1988, he was expelled from Vietnam in 1991 and settled in Rome. He went on to serve the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, becoming its president in 1998, and was made a cardinal by Pope John Paul II in 2001. He died in Rome on Sept. 16, 2002, after a battle with cancer. Pope Francis declared him venerable in 2017.
In a statement marking the 24th anniversary of his death on Sept. 16, the postulators overseeing Cardinal Van Thuan’s canonization cause said the date “invites us to recognize how his witness continues to speak to the Church and to the world today.”
“Cardinal Van Thuan did not merely speak of hope: he held fast to it when, humanly speaking, all seemed lost,” the postulators said, adding that his life shows that “history can truly change when even a single person takes the Gospel and the dignity of all people seriously.”
The postulation team, Waldery Hilgeman, Paolo Daviè, Claudia Di Lorenzi, Father Hubertus Blaumeiser and Maria do Sameiro Freitas, also celebrated the fact that Pope Leo XIV cited Cardinal Van Thuan in his encyclical “Magnifica Humanitas” this year, listing the cardinal among witnesses who embodied “the hope of the Gospel and the dignity of the human person” under harsh conditions.
Cardinal Van Thuan is known to generations who came after him through his books, which include “Five Loaves & Two Fish,” “Prayers of Hope, Words of Courage,” and “The Road of Hope: A Gospel from Prison.”
His postulators also celebrated that a biography of the cardinal written by his sister, presented in Rome in March at a conference titled “François-Xavier Nguyen Van Thuan: Witness of Hope,” which also marked the 50th anniversary of the publication of “The Road of Hope.”
Several cardinals who knew Van Thuan shared memories at that conference. Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle recalled being extremely nervous when giving a speech to Asian bishops in the Philippines in 1995, after which Cardinal Van Thuan offered him encouragement.
“The bishop said, ‘I am Archbishop Francis Xavier Nguyen from Vietnam, now serving in the Vatican.’ I felt like lightning just hit me. This is the one that I have heard about. Now he is standing in front of me, consoling me, assuring me, affirming me,” Cardinal Tagle remembered.
“We sat down. He recounted his story. It was afternoon. It struck me that as he recalled, painful, and even humiliating experiences, his voice remained calm, his face serene. That was not a trace of bitterness and hatred in him,” he added.
Cardinal Michael Czerny, prefect emeritus of the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development, recalled how Cardinal Van Thuan spent his first years in Rome doing “impressive work in support of Vietnamese refugees across the globe, both on a human and a spiritual level, promoting an international aid network and a wide range of initiatives.”
South Korean Cardinal Lazarus You Heung-sik, prefect of the Dicastery for the Clergy, who knew Cardinal Van Thuan personally described him as “a man of great gentleness, serenity and inner freedom” who evangelized even in prison. He recounted the testimony of one of the cardinal’s former guards, who was later baptized and said meeting the future cardinal had been “the most important encounter of my life.”
At the March conference, Cardinal Van Thuan’s sister also described how her family, then refugees in Sydney, Australia, learned in 1976 that her older brother had been moved to solitary confinement, news that brought her mother to tears.
During that period of solitary confinement Phú Khánh prison, Cardinal Van Thuan wrote, on the feast of the Holy Rosary, “I am happy here, in this cell, where white mushrooms are growing on my sleeping mat, because You are here with me, because You want me to live here with You. I have spoken much in my lifetime: now I speak no more. It’s Your turn to speak to me, Jesus; I am listening to You.”
Courtney Mares is Vatican editor for OSV News. Follow her on X @catholicourtney.