{"id":182,"date":"2007-09-17T10:31:34","date_gmt":"2007-09-17T10:31:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2007\/09\/blessed-are-they.html"},"modified":"2007-09-17T10:31:34","modified_gmt":"2007-09-17T10:31:34","slug":"blessed-are-they","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2007\/09\/blessed-are-they.html","title":{"rendered":"Blessed are they"},"content":{"rendered":"

Today, the cause\u00a0for the beatification of Cardinal Van Thuan was opened. <\/a><\/p>\n

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.
\nThe 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.”
\nCardinal 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.”
\n“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.”
\nThe Holy Father concluded by expressing his joy at the news that the process of beatification of “this singular prophet of Christian hope” had begun.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The Daughters of St. Paul have a section dedicated to the Cardinal and his writings. <\/a>
\nThe Road to Hope, for example, is a collection of his writings while imprisoned. <\/a>
\nAlso on the Beatification front, on Saturday Father Basil Moreau, founder of the Congregation of the Holy Cross, was beatified. Here’s a section at the Notre Dame website dedicated to the beatification, including a blog from an ND student who’s over there with the large group in attendance. <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Today, the cause\u00a0for the beatification of Cardinal Van Thuan was opened. 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…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-182","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-saints"],"yoast_head":"\nBlessed are they - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2007\/09\/blessed-are-they.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Blessed are they - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Today, the cause\u00a0for the beatification of Cardinal Van Thuan was opened. 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…\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2007\/09\/blessed-are-they.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2007-09-17T10:31:34+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"http:\/\/pauline.org\/store\/media\/64730.jpg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"awelborn\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"Blessed are they - Via Media","robots":{"index":"index","follow":"follow","max-snippet":"max-snippet:-1","max-image-preview":"max-image-preview:large","max-video-preview":"max-video-preview:-1"},"canonical":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2007\/09\/blessed-are-they.html","og_locale":"en_US","og_type":"article","og_title":"Blessed are they - Via Media","og_description":"Today, the cause\u00a0for the beatification of Cardinal Van Thuan was opened. 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…","og_url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2007\/09\/blessed-are-they.html","og_site_name":"Via Media","article_published_time":"2007-09-17T10:31:34+00:00","og_image":[{"url":"http:\/\/pauline.org\/store\/media\/64730.jpg"}],"author":"awelborn","twitter_card":"summary_large_image","schema":{"@context":"https:\/\/schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2007\/09\/blessed-are-they.html","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2007\/09\/blessed-are-they.html","name":"Blessed are they - Via Media","isPartOf":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/#website"},"primaryImageOfPage":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2007\/09\/blessed-are-they.html#primaryimage"},"image":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2007\/09\/blessed-are-they.html#primaryimage"},"thumbnailUrl":"http:\/\/pauline.org\/store\/media\/64730.jpg","datePublished":"2007-09-17T10:31:34+00:00","dateModified":"2007-09-17T10:31:34+00:00","author":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/#\/schema\/person\/aea2dcda1635c9c2d6030d9c7595725a"},"breadcrumb":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2007\/09\/blessed-are-they.html#breadcrumb"},"inLanguage":"en-US","potentialAction":[{"@type":"ReadAction","target":["https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2007\/09\/blessed-are-they.html"]}]},{"@type":"ImageObject","inLanguage":"en-US","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2007\/09\/blessed-are-they.html#primaryimage","url":"http:\/\/pauline.org\/store\/media\/64730.jpg","contentUrl":"http:\/\/pauline.org\/store\/media\/64730.jpg"},{"@type":"BreadcrumbList","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2007\/09\/blessed-are-they.html#breadcrumb","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"name":"Home","item":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"name":"Blessed are they"}]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/#website","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/","name":"Via Media","description":"Amy Welborn","potentialAction":[{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/?s={search_term_string}"},"query-input":{"@type":"PropertyValueSpecification","valueRequired":true,"valueName":"search_term_string"}}],"inLanguage":"en-US"},{"@type":"Person","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/#\/schema\/person\/aea2dcda1635c9c2d6030d9c7595725a","name":"awelborn","image":{"@type":"ImageObject","inLanguage":"en-US","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/#\/schema\/person\/image\/","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-content\/wphb-cache\/gravatar\/9f2\/9f2100183464289fedc5b8a621c15110x96.jpg","contentUrl":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-content\/wphb-cache\/gravatar\/9f2\/9f2100183464289fedc5b8a621c15110x96.jpg","caption":"awelborn"},"description":"Amy Welborn was born in 1960, the only child of a now-retired professor of political science, a teacher-librarian-artist mother,deceased since 2001, was a teacher, librarian and artist. The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/182","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=182"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/182\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=182"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=182"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=182"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}