VATICAN CITY - Cardinal Francois Xavier Nguyen Van Thuan, whose agonizing account of imprisonment by the communists in Vietnam made him an inspirational figure for many Catholics in his homeland, has died. He was 74.
Nguyen Van Thuan, who went into exile in Rome more than a decade ago, died of cancer at a clinic Monday, the Vatican said.
Although he was made a cardinal only last year, Thuan had already appeared on lists of possible successors to Pope John Paul II, particularly by those believing the next pontiff could come from a poor, non-European country. Vietnam has the largest Roman Catholic community in Asia after the Philippines.
Thuan was ordained a priest in Vietnam on June 11, 1953. He was appointed deputy archbishop of Saigon just days before the South Vietnamese capital fell to the communist North in April 1975.
Targeted for his faith as well as his family connections — his uncle was Ngo Dinh Diem, the assassinated South Vietnamese president — Thuan spent 13 years in a communist "re-education" camp — nine of them in solitary.
During that time, he fashioned a tiny Bible out of scraps of paper. Sympathetic guards smuggled in a piece of wood and some wire from which he crafted a small crucifix.
"His record of what he did in solitary confinement is incredible," said Cardinal Bernard Law of Boston, who met Thuan shortly after Thuan was released from prison in 1989.
"He communicated with people outside, wrote messages of hope, prayers — those were smuggled out and duplicated in a primitive way, person to person. There was no fax, no typewriter," Law said.
In his book "The Way of Hope — Thoughts of Light from a Prison Cell," Thuan wrote: "In our country there is a saying: `A day in prison is worth a thousand autumns of freedom.' I myself experienced this. While in prison, everyone waits for freedom, every day, every minute. We must live each day, each minute of our life as though it is the last."
"He was a very powerful example on how to endure suffering," Law said. "He had a philosophy of life — take each moment, and live each moment in the love of Christ."
In 1991, Thuan was forced into exile. At the Vatican, he ran the Pontifical Council of Justice and Peace, handling issues such as Third World debt.
The Vatican said funeral arrangements were not yet known.