Saint Peter Phan Hữu Đa

Peter Phan Hữu Đa was born around 1802 in the village of Ngọc Cục, Nam Định province, into a poor working family. When he grew up he learned carpentry.

Carpentry is a trade of the hands and of patience. Planing each board, chiseling each joint, fitting together each table, chair and door. He married and supported his wife and children with those very hands. A devout, well-ordered household, not rich but never in want.

Outside working hours, he gave his time to the church. He rang the bell and set out what was needed for Mass. It sounds small, but every hour of prayer and every Mass needs someone to do these things quietly. No one notices the bell-ringer, until the day the bell falls silent.

Perhaps it is no accident that a carpenter was so close to God’s house. Jesus too was once a carpenter in Nazareth.

In 1861, Emperor Tự Đức’s edict of dispersal was enforced in Nam Định. Đa was arrested, taken to Xuân Trường prefecture, and then exiled to the village of Quá Linh.

They tortured him and pressed him to step over the cross. He would not. Those days stretched on for nearly a year. How his wife and children lived at home, no one recorded. We only know that each morning the bell of Ngọc Cục church was now rung by another hand, or not at all.

The governor summoned him, tried to persuade him, and promised to let him go home to his family if he agreed to step over the image of God. Đa answered, courteously and firmly:

“If you release me and let me go home to my family, I thank you very much; but as for stepping on the image of my God, I will never, ever obey you.”

He was a country craftsman of plain speech, but he knew how to draw a clear line. He thanked the mandarin for his goodwill, because he was a courteous man. But what already belonged to God, he would not trade.

On June 17, 1862, Đa was sentenced to be burned alive. The flames blazed up. As the fire died down, the soldiers thought he might still be alive and cut off his head with a knife.

His wife and the faithful came and quietly buried his body right at the execution ground. The following year they reburied him in his home village of Ngọc Cục.

Think of that wife. Nearly a year waiting for her husband, only in the end to receive his body from the ashes. And still she came, still she took care of everything, still she brought him home.

He was beatified on April 29, 1951, and canonized on June 19, 1988. His own feast day is June 17.

Đa’s death was violent. But do not let it overshadow the first half of his life: a hard-working carpenter, a devoted father, a man who quietly rang the bell and prepared the altar for his village church.

It was those small tasks, done faithfully year after year, that prepared in him a heart big enough to go to the end. Every parish today still has people like Đa: the one who sweeps the church, the one who arranges the flowers, the one who rings the bell. They may be the very saints we have not yet recognized.