Saint Peter Nguyễn Bá Tuần

Peter Nguyễn Bá Tuần was born in 1766 in the village of Ngọc Đồng, Hưng Yên province. As a boy he entered the House of God, studied Chinese characters, and then went into the seminary.

But the road was not smooth. An edict against the faith under Emperor Cảnh Thịnh forced the seminary to disband. The seminarian had to stop his studies halfway, not knowing when he could resume. Only when things grew calmer under Emperor Gia Long could he return to the study of theology. In 1807, at the age of forty-one, he was finally ordained a priest.

More than thirty years later, he was the elderly pastor of the parish of Lác Môn, Nam Định province.

In 1838, the persecution under Emperor Minh Mạng reached its peak. Father José Fernández (Hiền), a Spanish Dominican priest, was gravely ill in the village of Quần Liêu. But the villagers were afraid and did not dare to shelter a foreign priest. Sheltering a priest at that time was a capital crime.

Father Tuần heard the news and went to him at once. He stayed there so that the villagers would feel safe helping the sick man. A seventy-two-year-old man, frail himself, who could be arrested at any moment, chose to come and sit at his friend’s bedside.

Then the soldiers came hunting. The two old priests fled toward Kim Sơn, Ninh Bình, hiding in the marshes. Picture two old men, one sick and one aged, wading through mud, hiding among the reeds, dodging the patrols sent to find them.

They asked a man named Bát Biên for help. But that very man handed them over to Trịnh Quang Khanh, the governor of Nam Định.

Even at seventy-two, Father Tuần was beaten. The mandarin looked at the thin old man and perhaps thought a few beatings would be enough to make him give up his faith. He replied:

“It is true that I am old and frail, but God will give me the strength to accept every torment, and even death, for Him.”

He did not pretend to be strong. He admitted he was weak. But he believed his strength did not come from himself.

He was sentenced to death. But before the sentence was sent back from the capital, on July 15, 1838, Father Peter Tuần breathed his last in prison.

The faithful had to pay to recover his body, and took it home to be buried at Ngọc Đồng. Nine days later, Father Hiền, the friend he had come to care for, was also beheaded.

He was beatified on May 27, 1900, and canonized on June 19, 1988. His own feast day is July 15.

Father Tuần lived through two closures of the seminary and had to wait until past forty to become a priest. But what brought him to prison was not a manhunt aimed at him. It was friendship, his unwillingness to leave a brother priest lying sick and alone.

Jesus said: “I was sick and you visited me.” Father Tuần went to visit a sick man, and that visit brought him home to God.