Saint Francisco Gil de Federich (Tế)

He was born on December 14, 1702, in Tortosa, Spain. At sixteen he entered the Dominican Order. On March 29, 1727, he was ordained a priest.

In 1733 he went to Manila, joined the Province of the Most Holy Rosary, and was made secretary of the province. It was a safe post, with a roof, a desk and books. Many men would have been happy to stay there for life.

But he wanted to go where there were no shepherds. In the autumn of 1735 he set foot in Tonkin and took the Vietnamese name Tế.

He preached in Trực Ninh, Vũ Tiên, Kẻ Mèn and Lục Thủy, the low rice country of today’s Nam Định and Thái Bình. The former secretary now waded through paddies, crossed rivers by ferry, slept in Catholic homes and picked up Vietnamese one phrase at a time.

A few years later a man with an old grudge denounced him, and soldiers came to Lục Thủy. He gave himself up, as we saw at the start of this story, so that the villagers would not be punished along with him.

The informer held him for more than ten days to demand a ransom. The Catholics scraped money together to buy his freedom, but the price the man demanded was too high. In the end he was taken to Thăng Long.

In prison he came down with a bad bout of malaria, and torture left both his legs covered in wounds. They laid a holy image on the ground and told him to trample on it if he wanted to go free. He knelt and bent down to kiss the Cross.

On July 10, 1738, he was sentenced to beheading.

Then politics intervened, and his sentence was set aside and forgotten. For seven years he lived in prison, never knowing which day it would be carried out.

He did not sit and wait for death. Little by little the faithful were allowed to visit him, and at times he was even let out into the streets. He went on being a priest in captivity.

In the year 1741 alone, he heard two thousand seven hundred and sixty-seven confessions, baptized eighty-five people, and anointed eighty-eight sick people.

Think about those numbers. Nearly three thousand times a sinner knelt beside the imprisoned priest and went away with a lighter heart. Eighty-five people became children of God. Eighty-eight sick people were comforted before they died. The prison of Thăng Long had become the busiest parish around.

In 1743, another priest was brought in: Father Mateo Alonso de Leciniana, whose Vietnamese name was Đậu. Both were Spaniards, both Dominicans, both the same age, and now they shared a cell. They leaned on each other and together served the Catholics who found their way into the prison.

On January 22, 1745, under Lord Trịnh Doanh, the sentence forgotten for seven years was finally carried out. Father Tế and Father Đậu were beheaded in Thăng Long. He was forty-two. He had spent nearly ten years in Tonkin, more than half of them in prison.

The faithful carried his body back to the mission house at Lục Thủy, where he had stepped out to give himself up.

He and Father Đậu are the earliest martyrs among the 117 Vietnamese Martyr Saints.

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

Most people dread being found. Father Tế gave himself up so that others would not suffer, then spent his long years in prison doing exactly what he had been arrested for.

You can lock a priest behind bars. You cannot lock up the mercy of God that flows through his hands.