Cardinal loses cancer battle

CARDINAL Francois Xavier Nguyen Van Thufin, who suffered long years of communist imprisonment in Vietnam, died of cancer this week at a clinic after a long illness. He was 74.
"A saint has died," said Bishop Gianpaolo Crepaldi, secretary of the Pontifical Council of Justice and Peace, over which the Cardinal presided. In 1975, Pope Paul VI named Van Thuan coadjutor archbishop of Saigon just days before the South Vietnamese capital fell to communists from the North.
Nephew of Ngo Dinh Diem, the murdered South Vietnamese president, he spent 13 years in a communist "reeducation" camp, nine of them in solitary confinement.
When he was forced into exile in 1991, John Paul II gave him duties in the Roman Curia and eventually made him a cardinal in 2001.