Saint Martin Tạ Đức Thịnh

Martin Tạ Đức Thịnh was born in 1760 in the village of Kẻ Sét, Thanh Trì district, Hà Nội. He was the eighth of nine children.

When he was eighteen, his family began arranging a marriage for him. He refused and asked to enter the seminary. He knew what he wanted from early on.

After his ordination he served as the bishop’s secretary, then in the parishes of Ba Làng and Đồng Chuối. He worked at Nam Sang for about twenty years and finally went to Kẻ Trình.

His long life spanned the Tây Sơn years, the reign of Gia Long and then the brutal persecution under Emperor Minh Mạng. At eighty, illness had taken most of his strength, but he kept to a priest’s way of life: praying, saying Mass when he could, living simply.

In 1840, soldiers surrounded the village of Kẻ Báng to look for priests. A Catholic had taken Father Thịnh into his home to nurse him through his illness.

The soldiers passed by, saw a frail old man lying there and took no notice. He could have got away.

But then he learned that Father Ngân and Father Nghi, two younger priests, had been arrested, and he could not lie still any longer.

When the squad leader passed by and asked whether he was a priest, the eighty-year-old answered:

“Yes, here I am.”

That was all. No hesitation, no pretending to be deaf or confused. Only the truth.

He was taken to the communal hall of Kẻ Báng, where he found Father Ngân, Father Nghi and the Catholics arrested with them. Then they were all taken to Nam Định.

He spent six months in prison. By day the eighty-year-old wore the cangue and chains; at night his feet were locked in stocks. And whenever the mandarin ordered, he was hauled into court to be questioned and beaten.

Think of that old, sick body. Yet he did not complain. He stayed beside his two younger brother priests, praying and waiting with them.

On November 8, 1840, Father Martin Thịnh was beheaded at the Bảy Mẫu execution ground, Nam Định, together with Father Ngân, Father Nghi and two laymen of Kẻ Báng, the headman Cỏn and Thọ.

His body was taken to Vũ Điện.

He was beatified on May 27, 1900, and canonized on June 19, 1988. His own feast day is November 8.

Father Thịnh was eighty. No one would have blamed him for lying quietly and letting the storm pass; he had served long enough. But he would not let his two brothers go alone.

His “here I am” echoes the prophets’ answer when God called them: “Here I am.” All his life he had answered God that way, from eighteen, when he turned down marriage for the seminary, to eighty, when he turned down silence to go with his brothers.