Saint Dominic Phạm Trọng Khảm

Dominic Phạm Trọng Khảm was born in 1780 in Quần Cống village, Trà Lũ commune, Nam Định province. He was one of the seven children of Phạm Tri Khiêm, a man of great standing in the village. Raised in a strict, orderly household and well educated, he went into government service as a mandarin while still young.

He married Agnes Phượng, a devout young woman from the same village. The couple raised their children in the faith, and that home would one day give the Church three saints.

Judging cases is work that can easily harden a man’s heart. Every day there were lawsuits to hear, wrongdoing to look at, the sordid quarrels of life to settle. Yet people remember Judge Khảm as a charitable, kind and upright man. In old age he also became head of the parish council, looking after the affairs of the whole community.

He knew better than anyone that sheltering a priest at home could cost a whole family their heads, for he himself had read those laws. Yet his house remained a refuge for priests and catechists. A man who knew the law as well as he did understood that some human laws must give way to the law of God.

In 1858, the French and Spanish allied forces arrived at Đà Nẵng. Emperor Tự Đức’s court was enraged, and Catholics bore the brunt of that anger. The edicts against the faith were enforced more harshly than ever. Catholic villages like Quần Cống were viewed with suspicion.

Soldiers came and surrounded the village. The old judge did not flee. He gathered the villagers at the communal hall and urged everyone to stay calm and stay faithful to God.

The mandarin had a cross laid in the middle of the courtyard and forced each person to step over it to show that they had renounced the faith. Judge Khảm, then nearly eighty years old, stood before the villagers and spoke plainly, as the village’s leading elder:

“If any of you tramples on the Cross, when the mandarin lets you go home I will drive you out of the village, and you will die with no place to be buried.”

The words sound harsh. But they were the words of an old man worried for his whole village, afraid that in a moment of weakness his children and grandchildren might throw away what mattered most. And the people of Quần Cống listened to him. Not one person stepped over the cross.

The mandarin was so furious that he swore:

“I will lose all my rank and salary if I cannot convict Khảm and his accomplices in the perverse religion.”

He was taken to the provincial court of Nam Định. They locked him up alone. The reason was clear: the mandarin feared that if the other Catholics so much as saw him or heard a word from him, they would take fresh courage.

An old man of nearly eighty, alone in a dark cell. No one to talk to, no one to pray with. Perhaps those were the days he prayed most in his life.

On January 13, 1859, Judge Khảm was strangled at the Bảy Mẫu execution ground in Nam Định. Put to death with him that day were Joseph Phạm Trọng Tả, a member of the same household, his son Luke Phạm Trọng Thìn, and seven other Catholics.

The people of Quần Cống still proudly call the three of them “Nhất gia tam Thánh”, one family, three saints.

He was beatified on April 29, 1951, and canonized on June 19, 1988. His own feast day is January 13.

People often think courage belongs to the young. Judge Khảm, at nearly eighty, shows the opposite. Some people have to live almost a whole life before they know which side they stand on. And once they know, they do not step back, not even half a step over a cross laid on the ground.

He also left us a fine picture of a father. It was he who persuaded his son, who had once gone astray, to come back. Then father and son walked the road together to the end. Family members can give one another many things. The Phạm family of Quần Cống gave one another the faith, and kept it to the end.