What to do when in jail? Joseph Nguyen Cong Doan sj could probably write the book of that title, having had ample time to think about it during the years he spent as a political prisoner in Vietnam, from 1980 to 1990. Now as the East Asia and Oceania Regional Assistant to Peter Hans Kolvenbach, the Rome-based Jesuit Father General, his is one of the most visible and powerful positions in the order. For the Jesuits, being a political prisoner can be something very like paying one’s dues as a blues musician: survivors of the process come out with something special to offer the rest of the world.
How did he survive? It was a dangerous time and place to be an active Catholic, in a post-war Vietnam scarred and suspicious of Western influence. In the 1980s most of the people of his generation were rebuilding families and lives. In the rest of the world it was the time when affluent baby-boomers were raising their families, buying their houses, building careers. Vietnam, the big noise of the 60s and early 70s, the icon for Western dissent and Western youth’s claiming of personal freedom, was all but forgotten as marriage, mortgages and material aspiration took over. As Doan served his sentence for ‘anti-revolutionary propaganda’ the world was changing; when he was released there would be work of a different kind, with tasks infinitely more complex, with a materialism more insidious than the idealistic kind that imbued his captors.
Inside jail there was prayer: he prayed seven hours a day. At times the prison was crowded, with up to 12 people in one small cell. It meant that Fr Doan effectively became the chaplain; there were seven other Jesuits, a Dominican and four lay people to attend to. Later there was farm work, an arduous but welcome respite from confinement. Talking with Fr Doan you can easily recall the stories of martyrs under the Tudors: Edmund Campion (the first one), and others of that ilk, called to account by Jesuits’ various enemies of the past. At times he was interrogated up to three times a day in two-hour blocks. One day the chief of the investigators, after having confiscated all the documents of the Society, focused on a section that was to do with fighting atheism. Doan tells it quietly, but you get the feel of an epic battle of wit: the challenge