Saint Joseph Nguyễn Văn Lựu

Joseph Nguyễn Văn Lựu was born around 1789 or 1790 in the Catholic community of Cái Nhum, Chợ Lách district, Vĩnh Long province. His family was poor. When he was about ten, his parents set out with their five children to look for land to farm, and finally settled in Mặc Bắc.

When he grew up he married and had seven children. The community trusted him and chose him as head parish elder. In the South at that time, the parish elder looked after the shared life of the Catholic community: caring for the church, organizing times of prayer, settling quarrels in the hamlet. Lựu was known as a peacemaker, and for something far more dangerous: sheltering priests during the persecution.

In the early 1850s the hunt for Catholics grew harsher. Someone in the area reported that Mặc Bắc was hiding a priest. On the night of February 26, 1853, soldiers surrounded the elder’s house, where Father Philip Phan Văn Minh was hiding.

The elder and his wife were beaten to make them give the priest away. Neither spoke. But Father Minh heard it all and could not bear to see the family that sheltered him suffer on his account. He came out and said he was a priest. The soldiers arrested him along with the household and took them to Vĩnh Long.

Old as he was, he was put in the cangue and chains and had to endure prison and sickness. Again and again they pressed him to give up his faith. He would not. In prison he asked Father Minh:

“Father, please pray for me, that I may be strong and steadfast to the end.”

When he heard that he was soon to be exiled far away, he said:

“I am about to go into exile. I leave everything in God’s hands.”

He never went. After more than a year in prison, the old man’s strength gave out. On the night of May 2, 1854, the elder Lựu died there in prison, before any sentence could be carried out. The faithful took his body back to Mặc Bắc and buried him on the foundations of the ruined church he had cared for all those years.

He was beatified in 1909 and canonized on June 19, 1988. His own feast day is May 2.

The elder Lựu was neither priest nor catechist. He was a father of seven whom the whole community trusted. But when the soldiers pounded on the door, his ordinary house became a shelter for the faith of a whole region, and he guarded that door to the end.