Saint Bernard Vũ Văn Duệ

Bernard Vũ Văn Duệ was born in 1755 in the village of Quần Anh, Nam Định province. In 1795, at the age of forty, he was ordained a priest.

From then on he served the Vicariate of Eastern Tonkin for nearly forty years. Forty years passing through so many Catholic communities, so many rice harvests, so many reigns. No one could count how many children he baptized, how many couples he blessed, at how many deathbeds he sat.

When he grew old and frail, he was allowed to retire at Trung Lễ. In retirement, life slowed down. He spent much time in prayer and acts of penance. Those who knew him worried about the health of a man past eighty.

Perhaps he thought he would die peacefully in his bed, surrounded by the prayers of the faithful. But God had another road for him.

On July 4, 1838, in the reign of Emperor Minh Mạng, soldiers came to search the place where he lived. He did not hide. He declared that he was a priest.

He was taken to Nam Định. The mandarin looked at the eighty-three-year-old and perhaps felt pity. He urged him to step over the cross so that he could go home and live out his old age.

He replied:

“Never will I betray my God.”

He was put in the cangue. A heavy wooden cangue on the neck of an eighty-three-year-old man.

In prison he heard that Bishop Ignacio Delgado (Y) had died in his wooden cage on July 12. The two men belonged to the same vicariate and had served together for so many years; now they spent the last days of their lives near each other in the same wave of arrests.

Perhaps the news did not frighten him but only made him more steadfast. His shepherd had gone ahead. He too would soon follow.

August 1, 1838, was the day of execution. By then he was too weak to walk. The soldiers had to carry him on a stretcher to the Bảy Mẫu execution ground. When they arrived, he asked to pray. Then he was beheaded. On the same day, Father Dominic Nguyễn Văn Hạnh was executed at the same place.

His body was later taken to Lục Thủy.

He was beatified on May 27, 1900, and canonized on June 19, 1988. His own feast day is August 1.

Perhaps there is no more moving image than the old man lying on a stretcher on his way to the execution ground. He no longer had the strength to walk. But he still had the strength to say: “Never will I betray my God.”

For nearly forty years he had gone out to the faithful. At the end of his life, when his legs could no longer carry him, others carried him. And that last journey brought him home to the Father.

For the elderly and the bedridden, Father Duệ is a comfort: even when you can no longer do anything, your faithfulness is still a gift offered to God.