Saint Mateo Alonso de Leciniana (Đậu)

Mateo Alonso de Leciniana was born on October 26, 1702, in Spain. He entered the Dominican Order, made his profession in 1723, and was ordained a priest in 1727, when he was only twenty-five.

In November 1730, he and twenty-four other Dominicans landed at the port of Manila. From there he was sent to Eastern Tonkin, a land he had never seen and a language he had never heard.

He learned Vietnamese and took the name Đậu. Then he traveled all over Kim Động, Tiên Lữ, Thần Khê and Vũ Tiên, areas now in Hưng Yên and Thái Bình.

Priests were few and Catholic villages many. There were sick people to visit, people who wanted to learn the faith, communities waiting for Mass. Father Đậu went from one place to another, along dikes, on ferry boats, down village paths that turned to mud in the rainy season. For more than ten years.

Catholics in the North in those days must have grown used to the sight of a Western priest in faded clothes, speaking Vietnamese with an accent, walking from one village to the next.

On November 29, 1743, he was celebrating Mass at Lục Thủy. A man who had abandoned the faith reported him to the authorities. Soldiers came.

He tried to protect the Blessed Sacrament and to slip through the cordon. But he was stopped, beaten, and then taken before the mandarin.

The Mass that day was cut short. But perhaps Father Đậu understood that from that moment on, his own life would become a Mass.

Before the provincial judge, he said simply:

“My duty is to teach the law of God, which is a holy and true law.”

He went on to explain that he only urged people to live honestly and do good, to practice virtue and keep away from wrongdoing. He harmed no one. He only taught people to live well.

Thanks to a kind-hearted mandarin, he was moved to the Eastern prison. There he found a fellow Dominican who was also a prisoner, Father Francisco Gil de Federich, known in Vietnamese as Father Tế. The two shared a cell.

Two Spanish priests of the same order, far from home, sharing a prison in a foreign land. They supported each other and prayed together. And they did not sit idle.

The Eastern prison became a small parish. Catholics found ways to slip in. In the year 1744 alone, Father Đậu baptized thirty-three people and heard six hundred and twenty confessions, right inside the prison.

Six hundred and twenty confessions. Try to picture it: one person after another quietly coming up to the bars, whispering their sins, and leaving with a lighter heart. The prison had become a confessional.

On January 22, 1745, in the time of Lord Trịnh Doanh, Father Đậu and Father Tế were led to the Đông Mơ execution ground and beheaded. Father Đậu was forty-two.

The faithful carried his body back to be buried at the Lục Thủy seminary, where he had been arrested in the middle of Mass.

He is one of the earliest of the 117 Vietnamese Martyrs.

He was beatified on May 20, 1906, and canonized on June 19, 1988. His own feast day is January 22.

The Mass at Lục Thủy that year was cut short. But for more than a year afterward, in a dark prison, he went on offering his whole life: through each baptism, each confession, each word of comfort. Until that last morning at Đông Mơ, when he offered God his final sacrifice: his own life.

People can cut a Mass short. But no one can cut short a priest’s love for his flock.