Saint Peter Trương Văn Đường

Peter Trương Văn Đường was born in 1808 in Kẻ Sở, Thanh Liêm district, Hà Nam province, into a poor family. His uncle was Father Peter Trương Văn Thi, a priest. It was this uncle who helped him go to the presbytery of An Tập to study Chinese characters and Latin.

At about twenty-six he became a catechist and was sent to help at Bầu Nọ. He taught the catechism to those preparing to become Catholics, doing the quiet daily tasks that keep a community alive.

At Bầu Nọ he worked beside Father Jean-Charles Cornay, a Frenchman whose Vietnamese name was Tân.

On June 20, 1837, soldiers came and surrounded Bầu Nọ to arrest Father Tân. Someone pointed out Đường, saying he was the priest’s disciple. He was arrested, together with the catechist Paul Nguyễn Văn Mỹ and young Peter Vũ Văn Truật, and taken to Sơn Tây.

In September of that year, Father Tân was put to death by slow dismemberment. His three disciples remained in prison.

On October 19, 1837, he was sentenced to strangling, but with detention pending execution, meaning no one knew when it would be carried out.

Fourteen months. A cangue on his neck, chains on his feet. Summers as hot as an oven, winters cold enough to crack the skin. Never enough rice. And each morning waking up not knowing whether today would be the last day.

Perhaps waiting is harder than dying.

In the midst of those months, he wrote to Father Marette, a missionary he had once helped:

“When I think of the great blessing I am about to receive, with the gate of heaven so near, I no longer long for anything in this world.”

A young man of thirty with nothing left to wish for in this world. Not out of despair, but because he had seen something greater. He asked the priest to pray for him, as a son asks his father for support.

At dawn on December 18, 1838, after receiving the sacrament of Reconciliation, the catechist Peter Đường was strangled, together with his two fellow prisoners, the catechist Mỹ and the catechist Truật. Three men arrested on the same day, who waited fourteen months together and died together on the same morning.

He was beatified on May 27, 1900, and canonized on June 19, 1988. His own feast day is December 18.

Some trials come quickly and pass quickly. And some drag on as if without end. Đường lived the second kind: fourteen months of waiting, not knowing the day.

In the long stretches of suffering, illness and waiting in our lives, we can learn from Đường: turn your eyes toward the gate of heaven. When the heart is turned there, the things of this world, however heavy, become lighter.