From Communist Prisons to the Roman Curia: The Journey of Cardinal Nguyễn Văn Thuận

I once wrote about Cardinal Nguyễn Văn Thuận’s Con Đường Hy Vọng (The Road of Hope) for a book review on Luật Khoa Magazine. Today, I find myself returning to another of his works, Chứng Nhân Hy Vọng (Testimony of Hope). Indeed, this book is very different from Con Đường Hy Vọng.

Cardinal Nguyễn Văn Thuận was not someone of an ordinary background within the Vietnamese Catholic Church. He was the eldest son of Ngô Đình Thị Hiệp, the older sister of President Ngô Đình Diệm, the president of the First Republic of Việt Nam.

That very lineage made him a special target for the communist government after April 30, 1975. Only a few months later, the authorities forced him out of his position as Coadjutor Bishop of Sài Gòn and arrested him. Instead of continuing a pastoral career, he entered a 13-year period of imprisonment, nine of which were spent in solitary confinement.

To be honest, I only learned about Chứng Nhân Hy Vọng recently through a friend. Until then, I had assumed Nguyễn Văn Thuận had left no memoir about his years in prison. Fortunately, this book preserves his rare recollections.

What is notable is that Chứng Nhân Hy Vọng is not a conventional memoir. It is a transcription of his spiritual exercises—lectures he delivered at the invitation of Pope John Paul II for the entire Roman Curia at the Vatican in the year 2000. For the first time in history, a Vietnamese bishop was invited to preach spiritual exercises to the Curia. The Pope quietly encouraged him to speak about his years in prison, weaving them into reflections on Christian faith.

Thus, the book is both a theological meditation on hope and a personal testimony. Readers follow him from Aug. 15, 1975—when he was “invited” to the Independence Palace and arrested, while the authorities summoned parishioners to the city theater to prevent unrest—all the way to Nov. 21, 1988, when he was released but forced into exile, never again permitted to return home.

The pages take us back to prison life: when he was transported to the North, when he was held in isolation, and when he unexpectedly met prison guards who were also Catholics.

At times he secretly celebrated Mass with crumbs of bread and a few drops of wine hidden in a bottle of tonic. At times he quietly taught a security officer to sing Latin hymns. At times he exchanged thoughts with northern priests about the Second Vatican Council—teachings they had never heard since 1954 because the communist government had severed the northern Church’s connection with the Holy See.

The narrative is simple but vivid enough to render the prison world with striking clarity.

Those thirteen years were anything but easy. There were moments he was exhausted, despairing, wishing only for death. Yet he also believed that prison itself was a “mission”: if he could not serve the faithful outside, then at the very least, he and the hundreds of other priests scattered across prison camps could still comfort believers in the harshest circumstances. That was why he chose love over hatred, hope over despair.

Thirteen years in prison is a period few would want to remember, and even fewer would willingly recount. But in Chứng Nhân Hy Vọng, Nguyễn Văn Thuận transformed those very years into material through which he spoke to the world about faith, love, and the ways a human being can survive in despair.

Reading Chứng Nhân Hy Vọng today, we learn not only about a Vietnamese cardinal who emerged from communist prisons to preach before the entire Roman Curia. We also gain a deeper glimpse into the reality faced by re-education prisoners after 1975. And coincidentally, I write this at a moment when the Vatican is calling to restart the canonization process for Cardinal Nguyễn Văn Thuận.

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Thúc Kháng wrote this book review article in Vietnamese and published it in Luật Khoa Magazine on Oct. 14, 2025. The Vietnamese Magazine has the copyrights for its English translation.