[ Marcel Văn and Clerical Abuse | Introduction | Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 ]

The impact of abuse on the human psyche is complex. There is an in-built need for psychological resilience, including in the realm where spirit intersects psyche (Part 2), but there is also a parallel need, outside the internal forum, in the external one, and this need necessarily manifests as either rebellion or resistance, the latter of which can be treated as a transformation of the former by means of psycho-spiritual resilience (Part 3). Trauma is also among the results of abuse (Part 4)—but so can be moral injury. Just as Marcel Văn has something to contribute to Christian understanding of each of resilience, resistance, and trauma survival, so too does he have experience of moral injury.

Trauma and moral injury

Trauma and moral injury are two distinct phenomena. In very general terms, trauma is a fear response, but moral injury is a trust response.

With trauma, the nervous system is affected in such a way that it’s just not the same as before. The effects may not develop into the full symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), but the underlying reality could still be lurking. Under sufficient shock or pressure—sometimes described as being thrown into “survival mode” too abruptly or for too long—the nervous system has been rewritten. What would be the set of normal reactions to stimuli is rapidly shunted out of the organism’s functioning, to be replaced with new reaction pathways. These new pathways are, basically and broadly considered, hyped-up fear responses. They can manifest in any number of ways. For obvious reasons, these are not a good fit for long-term survival. But they’ve been shoved in there anyway. That’s what the trauma did.

With moral injury, on the other hand, responses at the moral level are impaired. Fear itself is not a moral matter. Especially in a disrupted psychological system, whether fear is experienced or not has virtually nothing to do with acts of the will (present or even past, historical effects). Certainly, moral living affects what we do with fear, and what we do with fear gradually rewrites our constitution over time (the psycho-physical consequences of what theologians call “acquired virtue”). But a system that has been thrown massively out of whack just doesn’t re-right, and rewrite, itself in the usual timeframes and manners. Fear response is a different subject from moral injury.

Moral injury affects the more conscious level of trust. This could be concomitant with trauma. If a person in a vulnerable state is abused by a priest such that their stable sense of self and/or their safety is imperilled, this could be both traumatic and a disruption in the psycho-moral functioning of trust towards priests, the person’s own body, and their ability to relate their own stories in their community. Integral moral functioning in such a regime of life is difficult, if not impossible. Adherence to more primordial truths about God and self could be psychologically out of sync with the experienced facts about other people. Without any culpability, moral functioning is injured.

On the other hand, nothing about moral injury requires trauma. If a priest publicly shames me when I have done nothing wrong, and my community turns on me, I may experience moral injury—but I may not be strictly speaking traumatized. I never felt myself in great danger, and my nervous system didn’t rewrite itself as a result. But my relationships are functionally impaired at a moral level. Resources normally necessary to a healthy moral life are withdrawn from me. This was voluntary on the part of others, and my internal sense of trust knows this.

Moral injury can even be felt by adjacent parties. For instance, it is pretty clear that the clerical abuse crisis has spiralled into a crisis of trust and credibility. People who know abuse victims are also disenchanted of trust towards ecclesial institutions and/or representatives. The simple fact that a parallel culture of cover-up has existed is enough to shatter trust relationships well outside the immediate sphere of survivors. It is communal, national, even global. This, too, represents the varying degrees of moral injury.

A recent report[1] on clergy sexual abuse—which I will be using as a baseline and diagnostic in this article, even though Marcel Văn’s experience is considerably broader than clergy sexual abuse—defines moral injury and its scope as follows:

Moral injury results from a betrayal of trust, disrupting one’s beliefs and moral compass. It comprises persistent psychological and emotional distress, moral confusion, spiritual anguish, social alienation, and distrust for institutions. Moral injury overlaps with and extends beyond post-traumatic stress disorder, which inadequately spans the psychological, emotional, moral, spiritual, behavioral, and relational dimensions of human personhood.[2]

This study, which I highly recommend reading, focuses in particular on the impact categories of moral confusion, moral agency, moral identity, moral relationship to others, and the specific relationships to God and institutions—each of which were addressed by Marcel Văn in his own writings avant la lettre. (Santo subito, dottore subito!) There are also important implications for lived experience of conscience—which the study authors, astutely in this context, remark means “to know together.”[3] Impairment to the real ability to know together the matters of living entails moral injury.

Further sources are available giving the same information about moral injury. For an accessible version of this study’s findings, I recommend a podcast from Pope Francis Generation, with one of the writers of the moral injury report on as a guest.[4]

For present purposes—and knowing that this article is already going to be very long—I will simply take the general notions for granted and show what Marcel Văn has to contribute to this discussion. His writings cover, as I have said, all the impact categories spoken of by professionals specializing in the field of moral injury. He experiences all the main categories of moral injury, and his writings testify to which injuries he can deal with as a survivor—and which ones he can’t.

I propose to break down discussion of moral injury and Marcel Văn into two articles. The first article, focused on Văn’s life, will cover the impact categories of moral agency, moral identity, moral relationship to others, and the specific relationships to God and institutions. The second follow-up article will move on to include the death of Marcel, with special emphasis on how the form of his death is an actual conquering of the vestiges of confusion in moral reasoning that he suffered. In both articles, I think it will be clear how Văn’s holiness shines through despite the moral injury. He cannot remove the stains. Only providence does at the last moment. Yet his life is remarkably holy.

As with the account of the clerical abuse Văn survived (Part 1), these articles are not meant to be exhaustive. That would be impossible. They can only be indicative. I want to point to the fact that Văn knows all this. He may not describe his experience with the same categorization and abstraction as a professional psychologist, but if we are looking for passages illustrative of the psychological effects of abuse, Văn will provide, and what he gives is bathed in his profound experiential theology of abuse—which I stress again and again is a gift for the Church of today.

What is not covered here

Văn suffered many wounds of clerical abuse. Evidently some of these lasted for a long time but still did not rise to the level of what specialists call moral injury. Among such wounds, the one that holds the dearest place in my heart, for reasons that hardly need explaining, is how hurt he must have still been years after losing the nickname of Benjamin—that is, the youngest and favoured one—due to the evil machinations of his scorned sexual abuser (A 131, 150; SH 8).[5] It can’t help that Thérèse was a Benjamin (LT 71, 125, 139, 152).[6] Even if she weren’t, though, we can detect a trace of something that hasn’t completely healed. In a letter written over a decade later, Marcel remarks on being the youngest brother to join the Congregation during the tenure of the outgoing vice-provincial as follows: “I will never lose my title of Benjamin” with regards to the soon-to-be former superior (To Father Edmond Dionne, 30 Nov 1947).[7]

Something here smarts, for sure. But as far as we can tell, it doesn’t affect the normal process of moral reasoning, moral trust, and moral decisiveness. Probably the reason is that “Benjamin” isn’t actually Văn’s name; it’s a nickname. It would be quite horrific to remove someone’s name without their consent, but if a dear nickname is lost, it might not cause the same level of harm. This kind of injury isn’t what I’m talking about in this post.

What is covered here

There are some wounds, however, which not only hurt for a long time, but also cause a disorder in the fundamental workings of moral thought, decision-making, and action. These disorders need not necessarily impose themselves continuously. They might only be felt in some circumstances now and then. Văn is not without these injuries also. He suffers moral injury.

We can detect the very general manifestations of moral injury in a lot of expressions scattered throughout the Autobiography. Marcel says he was “ill with the anxiety which imprisoned my life in a narrow, parched setting” (A 532). This parched character, though, is not only external. It sinks its teeth into him. He is ill. Something is wrong with him. His life was “more or less sickly as if it had not yet recovered entirely the serenity of early infancy” (A 533). For years, there persist “the after-effects of the sickness of my soul” (A 533). It is these “after-effects” that I will be breaking down according to the impact categories used by specialists.

We should also be aware that the “after-effects” extend beyond Marcel and other immediate victims—and he knows it. In some notes written to inform his spiritual director of the situation outside the Redemptorist monastery, he says that “the Catholic Church in Vietnam is now as if on its last legs,” for he sees and hears of “priests and missionaries [who] behave in a manner unworthy of an apostle of Jesus who loves me” (OWV 793).[8] Indeed,

Without being myself a canonical visitor of the dioceses, I have heard the opinions of people of many dioceses, and almost all of those who have witnessed things close reported similar things. (OWV 796)

Regarding some foreign missionaries, he wonders why they even came and why, if their goal was so lofty, “so many souls moan on seeing [their] works”; indeed, apparently, “all who lived with these missionaries asked this question” (OWV 800). Asking the question leads to different results for different people. In some cases, “whereas the Christians were not yet very numerous, one has seen many of them apostatise for having been too oppressed” (OWV 805). In yet others, not only does abusive behaviour cause insiders to leave, but also causes outsiders to never enter (OWV 805–806). Still other Catholics move in the opposite direction: “If the priests behave in this way, all the more reason why we should” (OWV 808). Moral injury manifests itself in a diversity of wounds.

Now, like many of his background and abilities, Marcel is given to a bit of exaggeration, and he is hardly a sociologist adequate to the diagnosis of a local institutional eclipse. Things might not be as deathly as he implies. Yet he is right about the essential nugget. Moral injury is not only individual. It is social. Proximity to moral evil that the mind cannot properly process is scandalous and propagates its fissures into the thought patterns of adjacent parties, then somehow at the same time pressurizes and finally alters one’s consciousness. Its personal effects are real. But its social effects are also real. All these effects are destructive, and focusing on Marcel’s individual experience should in no way detract from the broader reality of moral injury in his times and our own.

Conscience

The authors of the referenced report on moral injury stress that conscience is a locus of the discussion of moral injury.[9] You can’t talk about wounds to moral thought, reasoning, and action without talking about impairment to conscience. This is not, strictly speaking, a separate impact category. It is more like the reference point of all the others. If you compromise someone’s sense of agency, you hinder the working of conscience. If you wound trust in relationships, you hurt the functioning of conscience. And so on. None of this is independent.

With that said, there is not much to talk about regarding conscience other than to emphasize the value that Marcel places on it. He consistently calls Father Antonio Boucher his “director of conscience,” not his “spiritual director” or similar. There are exceptions here and there. But it’s an “exceptions prove the rule” kind of thing. I don’t think there is any document or time period at all in his writings that he deviates from his general tendency.

This is all the more remarkable since Văn doesn’t have etymology to fall back on. In Latin, conscientia is literally “with” and “knowledge.” It’s a knowledge-together-with. It’s something you can have with proper deliberation and presence of the helpful thought of others in your life. But in Vietnamese, lương tâm has different components. The first connects to wages, the second to a plethora of aspects of mind or spirit.

Yet Văn is totally committed to seeing a “director of conscience” as very important, to seeing conscience as something to fully exercise with another, and to seeing it as a matter quite related to his personal experience of abuse.

Moral agency

Moral agency and injuries thereto are described as “the capacity to exercise free will or the experience of constraint/futility.”[10] In other words, the abuse survivor feels blamed for speaking up when telling someone what happened, feels a sense of futility, feels an unravelling of agency, or feels fated to a life of unmatched desires.[11]

This, naturally, sounds a bit abstract. It is not immediately clear to me exactly what kinds of futility might be covered here. I have ideas, but in reading the definition, I am a bit hesitant. Some solid examples, still drawing from the same report on moral injury, can be useful reference points. I propose to draw helpful quotations from survey participants which the authors of the study correlated to harm done to a sense of moral agency:

“And then the, you know feeling unworthy. Um… Well, I mean I had no voice. I had no voice at the table. Why would anyone listen to me?”[12]

“I had kept all this inside, uh, because any kind of youth doesn’t have the emotional capacity to express my own needs, given the nature of this abuser, and his public status. And, my parents loved him dearly, as a dear friend. And those types of scenarios are literally impossible for a young person to, to overcome.”[13]

“I didn’t gain any of my power back until I started to share my story because then they didn’t own me anymore.”[14]

These are concrete notions. They are also sentiments that we can find parallels to in Marcel’s writings. Each of these quotes has a correlative in Văn’s life.

Văn’s experience is such that he, too, could say that he isn’t listened to, that he has no voice. Even at the most stable period of his post-abuse life, once he finds his home among the Redemptorists, his confreres do not seem to grasp that he could have been through a lot. Marcel writes: “There is always one or another of the brothers who thinks that I have never had to suffer” (Conv. 521–522).[15] And: “It is often said of me that I am frivolous, that I do not know how to reflect or that I never experience sadness” (To Brother Andrew, 22 May 1949). Marcel doesn’t feel like he can change this, so he doesn’t try. There is just so much that he has been through, and if they already doubt that he could have been through anything, protesting could easily force him to defend his dignity—something no one deserves.

Marcel also experienced the inability of his family to accept the reality of what had happened to him. It is impossible for him to overcome this fact. This kind of futility he knows also. Around the time that he ran away from the presbytery at Hữu Bằng, the futility was explicit. Văn was “not allowed” to explain himself at home (A 297). Still at that point undaunted, though certainly feeling the sting, he tried. Yet his mother “did not stop repeating” how incredible it was that a priest she knew could be this bad (A 299). The public status of the abuser and the attachment of a parental figure to that abuser get in the way of the truth. These are hallmarks of injury to moral agency. They directly parallel memories from survey participants quoted above.

In Văn’s life, this issue doesn’t completely subside. Years later, Marcel tells his sister that “until now, no one has been able to understand my reasons for running away” from Hữu Bằng and that, had his own beloved mother found out, even she “would not have believed the truth of my words” (To Lê, 15 Aug 1946). There is the futility on full display. Marcel believes his mother to be a saint (To his mother, 16 Jul 1949; To his parents, 28 Jan 1951; To his mother, 13 Aug 1951). Somehow, it is completely futile to convince a saint that her own son tells the truth; this black area remains. What dissonance! Marcel is in control of his life—but he could never do this. He stops trying. It’s not going to happen.

Part of the reason for this futility is that Văn knows how enmeshed his mother is in the culture of disbelief and cover-up, like so many have been down the ages. When she finally sees a disorderly presbytery with her own eyes, she believes—but even then, she tells her son to stay there because, if he were to leave, tongues would wag and “we have a duty to safeguard the reputation of priests” (A 302). If this is what she says in reaction to the evil she personally observes, how can she ever do differently for the evil she does not herself experience? The sense of futility is not unfounded.

Finally, we can find in Marcel also the power of writing down one’s story. He is, however, not nearly as positive about it as the study participant quoted above. Although Jesus has already said in the Conversations that the autobiographical work of Marcel “will serve to make known the love that I have for all souls as well as for you” (Conv. 23), he doubts. He writes in his autobiography: “I do not know if what I write will have any influence on those souls who will come after me” (A 3). Furthermore, he feels he can’t get it right:

I have already told my story to you three times, and on each occasion, I have noted that there were big mistakes. It is because I have had to make several versions of my story that you may have some difficulty in understanding me. (A 2)

It’s as if he knows the liberating potential of telling his story, but he struggles to get there. One can hope that the final version of the Autobiography satisfied this exigency and that he felt more like the study participant: “I started to share my story,” and “then they didn’t own me anymore.” But I’m not sure if we ever know this happened. During his lifetime, Marcel didn’t share his full story with anyone except his director of conscience.

Moral identity

Injuries to moral identity impact “the sense of one’s inherent goodness or the experience of shame.”[16] This, too, is something that Marcel tells us about in his own life. There are two events that stand out here, one in the Autobiography, the other in the Conversations.

Văn had a lot of things done to him. Many of these things are basically unspeakable. It left a mark. After having left the most abusive parts of his past and moved far away, he encountered Thérèse of Lisieux—first through her writing, then in some mystical way. At this time, he was still concerned that the sins of others had made him a bad person: “When I was small I heard my mother teach me many things about God and perfection, but during my stay at Hữu Bằng a thousand torments were used to divest me of all my beautiful thoughts” (A 594). Thérèse listens to this wounded little boy. She asks him whether he has ever approved as good what “these inhuman creatures” did. Văn replies:

No, I have never approved them in such an insane manner. Neither have I ever lost confidence in God, since, if I had abandoned God, who then would I have been able to follow? Nothing was more painful to me than to notice in my relations with God that there was a sort of veil which separated me from him. (A 595)

This comment starts to bleed into a further impact category, namely, relationship with God. But we can also plainly detect the impact on a sense of self. If Văn thinks there is something between him and God, it’s because he thinks he’s been made, by the actions done to him, bad. He knows that he didn’t do these things; they were done to him (A 134, 143). Yet he still feels that way. He’s stained. He’s wrong. His thought processes are messed up by what has been done to him. Thérèse, of course, will help him gradually overcome this self-image in numerous ways.

Moral self-image affects not just the soul, but also the body. Marcel doesn’t talk about this explicitly, but there is a passage in the Conversations that really makes one wonder. In his mystical experience, Marcel gets a spontaneous “anointing of the sick” from little Jesus (Conv. 593–594, 622–623). Essentially, Jesus touches different parts of Marcel in order, declaring something about them good, sometimes proclaims that it belongs to him, and gives it a kiss. One after the other, Jesus “anoints” Marcel’s eyes, mouth, nose, ears, heart, hands, feet. That is, Jesus declares as sanctified all the external senses of Marcel (sight, taste, smell, hearing, touch), his heart, and the limbs that represent action in the place one is (hands) and can go to (feet). He declares them good. He declares them his.

This experience is not without its effects. The tiredness Marcel was experiencing disappears. Indeed, he laughs a little. He finds the acts that Jesus performed kind of humorous, since he is not particularly clean when it happens. But therein lies something worth pondering. Whatever spiritual shock or disgust might remain in Văn as a psychosomatic person subject to abuse, Jesus is forthrightly saying that his body is not bad; he is loved. Marcel thinks he is not clean—and on the face of things, that comes across as literal about the body needing a bath, not figurative about the person as a moral entity—but Jesus stoops down anyway.

I would suggest that there’s a lot to think about here. Just how much of a negative moral identity spilled over from the soul to the body? Marcel was, after all, a victim of sexual and physical abuse. Even psychological abuse can affect how one feels in one’s own skin. To actually experience violations of bodily integrity is even more dangerous to moral identity. Is the “anointing” of eyes, mouth, nose, ears, heart, hands, and feet a way of declaring Marcel’s body clean? Is it a way of healing residual moral injury to personal identity? I do not want to think that Văn was so injured so as to need such healing. But I also do think it needs to be left open to interpretation, so that for anyone who may find Văn a holy person to pray to, he may be seen as someone who would understand the healing they need.

Moral relationship with others

A moral relationship with others involves, in the positive register, “feeling safe and being able to trust others” and, the in the negative, “the experience of betrayal, stigmatization, or isolation.”[17]

Arguably, Marcel’s vocation to be a “hidden apostle” is a manifestation of such moral injury. We often read that Marcel does not share his story; he has a constant need to make sure people do not know what he is really doing and what his internal forum is really like (e.g., Conv. 43). Context shows that this is not a major concern of God, as far as Marcel understands it. The concern for privacy is his own. To some extent, this could just be his naturally reticent personality (A 4, 9–10). Yet it also can be a response to his life history. Does he feel safe to entrust his story to others, or whatever bits and pieces slip out in their presence? It’s not clear.

What is clear, however, is that Marcel unreasonably and continually fears expulsion and abandonment, and he displays a persistent unease with others.

Marcel frequently worries about being expelled from the Congregation over not being a good enough worker, too weak, too ineffective (e.g., Conv. 489, 510, 517–519; OWN6.10, 15; OWV 777). In fact, he goes pretty far about this matter. In something that Marcel knows Father Antonio Boucher (“bearded Jesus”) will read, he claims, “if bearded Jesus sends me home, he must also make little Jesus leave with me” (Conv. 517). Marcel forgets this afterwards (OWV 779). But he says it. It sounds almost like a threat, but one made from a place of complete helplessness—in other words, begging, a real plea. Clearly, Marcel is unreasonably worried and agitated. Jesus can offer him assurance on the grounds of sound spiritual theology: “You must not be afraid of being sent away because of your weakness, because it is little Jesus who allows these weaknesses in order to remove from you all self-confidence and to lead you to place all your confidence in him alone” (Conv. 518). Yet why is Marcel so caught up on the idea of being sent home?

The obvious answer is that he was mistreated—spiritually abused, in fact—in this way before. At one point, Văn actually wanted to leave the Dominican minor seminary at Quảng Uyên. He asked permission to leave. It simply wasn’t given. Where Văn wanted to not be, he was forced to remain. Yet, very shortly afterwards, the superior decided to kick Văn out. He was forced out disgracefully, even though he had asked to leave. This not only compromised his reputation, but it must have further stretched the psychological harm. When he wants to leave, he’s not allowed. When he stays, he’s forced out. It’s a sick psychological game, and Văn cannot have failed to be affected (A 688–698; To Tế, 26 Aug 1951).

Years later, with the Redemptorists, Văn’s concern might be unreasonable. But he knows the unreasonable. He remembers it. The Dominicans did this to him then. Why not the Redemptorists now? This is what impairs his trust at the psychological level, even as his will adheres to “bearded Jesus” over and over. It is an indisputable moral injury.

It is the stability of vows, first temporary and then permanent, that frees him from this fear. “Now, I no longer fear leaving the community,” writes Marcel (To Aunt Khánh, 4 May 1947), “and Jesus himself can no longer chase me away since we are united as one.” The phrasing here is reminiscent of the “threat” that he would take little Jesus away with him if kicked out. But the meaning has inverted. There is no hint of past tension. What remains is the notion that Jesus cannot do this, it cannot happen, his peace is assured, his anxiety is subdued.

Relationship to God and institutions

There can also be moral injury to how one relates to God and to the sense of “feeling connected and finding institutions credible,” frequently manifested as “experiencing abandonment, punishment, and loss of confidence in the authority or credibility of the church.”[18]

Văn shows us examples of these kinds of moral injury, too. At one point, he asks himself: “If people cannot put up with me, can God put up with me anymore?” (SH 15) We have also seen in the section on moral identity how Văn’s questioning of his inherent goodness led to his supposing that a wall or “veil” had been erected between him and God.

There are other passages that make one wonder if Văn’s thinking is an effect, at least partially, of a moral injury. For instance, he writes, “I do not wish to deal with God as my Lord, but only as my Father; I do not wish to give him the name of Lord, but only that of Father” (Conv. 323–324). This went so far as him denying Saint Alphonsus the title of father, “since I believed that it was only appropriate to give to God alone the name of Father” (Conv. 348).

In someone whose psyche hasn’t been considerably harmed, it is understandable to want to deal with God primarily as Father and only secondarily as Lord, and to know that God is Father preeminently, whereas priests and founders are only paternal by analogy. But is the desire to deal with God only as Father, and that only him, normative? I don’t think it can be taken as a normal model. It would even clash with Văn’s predilection to see the Love of God as encompassing all the relationships in one (Conv. 635–640; To Tế, 21 Apr 1951). Yet, despite being non-normative and at odds with Văn’s own ideas, the exclusive preferences regarding fatherhood appear to be holy in Marcel’s case. Is it some result of bad paternal care, particularly from priests? I don’t think we can say for sure. But we can certainly wonder. This could be the visible effects of another moral injury. His relationship with God is impacted well beyond the time of his healing meeting with Thérèse, even if not in such a way as to compromise its integrity.

Another locus of questioning would be the repeated assurance throughout the Conversations that Jesus has not scolded Marcel, coming from Jesus himself (e.g., Conv. 417, 486–487, 542) or Mary (e.g., Conv. 426). Văn’s sensitivity is obviously off the charts. He is, by temperament, shy, fearful, and sensitive (A 4, 9–10; Conv. 441, 523). But would it not also be reasonable to assume a moral injury from so much emotional and psychological abuse in his past? If so, the healing of this moral injury seems to happen in real time before our eyes in the Conversations. Later on, Marcel lets slip that he is internalizing this message: Jesus will never scold him. After all, he argues logically, if “bearded Jesus,” being his director of conscience, is like Jesus’ spirit, then he simply could not scold Marcel, because Jesus wouldn’t (Conv. 549). The wound is healing. It takes time. It takes patience. It takes a good environment and the trust of authority figures. But it is healing.

Consider also the following as an example of a fractured relationship to institutions. Marcel has been with the Redemptorists for many years. He has learned to fit in rather well. The institutions of the Church don’t hurt him as much as some other clerical abuse survivors. Yet he can still feel it. Writing to his long-time director of conscience, he implores him not to use certain hierarchical pronouns in the Vietnamese language. Pronouns and their inherent sense of relationship constitute a topic repeatedly broached in the mystical discussions with Jesus, Mary, and Thérèse (Conv. 393, 469, 483, 584–587, 703, 760). Marcel now directs discussion of it at his director of conscience, then adds:

When you speak to me in particular, I beg you to do so as a father to his child. That is a wish I expressed to you formerly. If you did not pay attention to this, I would hesitate to read your letters, and when I would write to you, my letters would lack simplicity, since I would then express to you my feelings as to a certain father that I know, but not to a spiritual father. And it would be very difficult for me to open my heart to you.

That is, for me, an obligatory recommendation and I hope that you will pay attention to it. If not, I am threatening to no longer read your letters. (To Antonio Boucher, 21 Feb 1950)

This passage has been read in a way that seems to me, frankly, boneheaded. Archbishop Renato Boccardo, in his preface to the letters collection, interprets this as the kind of “threat so often used by adolescents who claim themselves, rightly or wrongly, badly loved, if at all” and which would thus “make us smile.”[19] I guess that is one possible interpretation, and I suppose it is occasioned by the archbishop’s long connection with World Youth Day during the pontificate of John Paul II. But it still seems to me a very parochial point of view. From the standpoint of understanding Marcel Văn himself, I do not find it credible or worth anyone’s time. Marcel is here a couple weeks shy of his 22^nd birthday, with total life experience greater than most people accumulate before they die, and I do not know how a reader of the complete works can believe that he doesn’t think himself loved by his “bearded Jesus,” of all people.

The archbishop misses the obvious. This is not an adolescent talking from the position of assessment of his situation relative to others in a general sense. He is not “acting out,” as we call it nowadays. The case is rather that of a survivor of clerical abuse talking to a priest—a priest with spiritual power over him, his director. These are the actual, known characteristics of the sender and recipient of this letter. And saying that makes a whole lot of sense out of what Văn writes. It is basically an abuse survivor saying that there is a psychological line that may be okay to cross in general, and which it may not be morally wrong as a norm to violate, but given his past, it is not okay for him. It’s triggering. That’s what we’d say today. This is about mental health. It is even, in a broad sense, about being pro-life. And what is remarkable is that Văn’s obvious sanctity is compatible with frankly, directly asserting this, using a “threat” that if you don’t A, then I might have to B. The “threat” of course is from weak to strong, and I don’t typically call those “threats” so much as frank statements, particularly when doused in as much gentleness and humour as Marcel manages here.

Changing suffering into joy is a general philosophy. For Văn, it is even a general discovery in the wake of abuse. It transfigures his life. But it does not whitewash everything. There are things which remain morally injured even within Marcel’s total transformation by the Christmas grace, by the October grace, and by meeting Thérèse of Lisieux.

There just are damaged parts. When this is the case, Marcel says so and does not back down. That, I think, is two things.

It is an expression of the “little way” of Thérèse, as might be indicated from a letter he wrote to his younger sister: “if our parents ask you to do something beyond your strength, it is necessary to inform them” and the parallel duty “to let your director know the state of your soul” (To Tế, 20 Oct 1946).

More than this, it is also, I think, a form of heroic adherence to the truth—the general truth, yes, but the particular truth of his own lived experience and fragility, too, when it can only trump or interfere with the general truth. Văn is not just his ideas, however divinely inspired they may be. He is a person, a little one of Jesus, a beloved. What Archbishop Boccardo reads as an adolescent threat, I read as heroic honesty, a testimony that this is a real human being of heroic virtue.

It is, in fact, this heroic honesty that will lead Marcel Văn to his death. The intellectual virtue of honesty was infected by moral injury in the wake of so much abuse, but God will be victorious over that and lead Marcel to the death of a confessor of the faith through and in spite of and in utterly vanquishing the residual effects of moral injury.

That is the subject of the next post in this series on Marcel Văn and clerical abuse.

Images in header: Marcel (right) with his director of conscience, Father Antonio Boucher; Redemptorist monastery, Hanoi

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[1] Marcus Mescher, Kandi Stinson, Anne Fuller, and Ashley Theuring, “Measuring & Exploring Moral Injury Caused by Clergy Sexual Abuse,” Xavier University (2022).

[2] Ibid., 1.

[3] Ibid.

[4] SmartCatholics / Pope Francis Generation, “Marcus Mescher – Marcus Mescher and Clerical Sexual Abuse,” YouTube (10 Aug 2023).

[5] A = Marcel Van, Autobiography, trans. Jack Keogan (Complete Works 1; Versailles: Amis de Van Éditions, 2019); SH = Father Antonio Boucher, Short History of Van (Versailles: Amis de Van Éditions, 2017). References to section number, not page number.

[6] All references to Saint Thérèse of Lisieux using the system in Œuvres complètes (Paris: Cerf / Desclée de Brouwer, 2023), with translations my own. Note further that the term le Benjamin was also used in some earlier editions at Ms A, 71v, even though Thérèse herself wrote on that occasion la dernière (“the last”), not le Benjamin.

[7] To = Marcel Van, Correspondence, trans. Jack Keogan (Complete Works 3; Versailles: Amis de Van Éditions, 2018).

[8] OW = Marcel Van, Other Writings, trans. Jack Keogan (Complete Works 4; Versailles: Amis de Van Éditions, 2018). Additional system for abbreviations explained on page 14, e.g., OWN = notebooks; OWV = various writings.

[9] Mescher et al., “Measuring & Exploring Moral Injury,” 1.

[10] Ibid.

[11] SmartCatholics / Pope Francis Generation, “Marcus Mescher – Marcus Mescher and Clerical Sexual Abuse,” vid. cit.

[12] Mescher et al., “Measuring & Exploring Moral Injury,” 9.

[13] Ibid.

[14] Ibid.

[15] Conv. = Marcel Van, Conversations, trans. Jack Keogan (Complete Works 2; Versailles: Amis de Van Éditions, 2017).

[16] Mescher et al., “Measuring & Exploring Moral Injury,” 1.

[17] Ibid.

[18] Mescher et al., “Measuring & Exploring Moral Injury,” 1.

[19] Renato Boccardo, “Preface,” in Marcel Van, Correspondence, trans. Jack Keogan (Paris: Amis de Van Éditions, 2018), 8.