VATICAN CITY, SEP 17, 2007 (VIS) - This morning the Pope received officials and members of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace for the fifth anniversary of the death of the Vietnamese Cardinal Francois-Xavier Nguyen Van Thuan, whose beatification cause has recently been opened. Also present at the audience were members of the St. Matthew Foundation and of the Cardinal Van Thuan International Observatory for the dissemination of the Church's social doctrine.
The Pope recalled the fact that Cardinal Van Thuan had been president of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, and that he had launched the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church, published in October 2004. He also recalled the late cardinal's "cordiality, ... his capacity for dialogue and for being close to everyone, ... his fervent commitment to spreading the Church's social doctrine among the world's poor, his longing for evangelization in his own continent of Asia, and his skill in coordinating activities of charity and human promotion which he initiated and supported in the most out-of-the-way places on earth."
Cardinal Van Thuan, said Benedict XVI, "was a man of hope, he lived on hope and he spread it to everyone he met. It was thanks to this spiritual energy that he resisted all physical and moral difficulties. Hope sustained him as a bishop isolated for 13 years from his diocesan community; hope helped him to see, in the absurdity of the events that befell him (he was never put on trial during his long imprisonment), a providential plan of God."
"Cardinal Van Thuan loved to repeat that Christians are people of the here and now, of the present moment which must be welcomed and experienced with the love of Christ. And his capacity to live for the present demonstrated his intimate abandonment in the hands of God and the evangelical simplicity which we all admired in him."
The Holy Father concluded by expressing his joy at the news that the process of beatification of "this singular prophet of Christian hope" had begun.
AC/VAN THUAN/... VIS 20070917 (350)
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