Saint Peter Vũ Văn Truật

Peter Vũ Văn Truật was born in 1817 in the village of Hà Thạch, Kẻ Thiếc community, Sơn Vi district, Sơn Tây region. His father died young. The family was poor, and he seldom went to school.

At about fifteen he was taken into the House of God, the community that trained catechists, by Father Jean-Charles Cornay, a French missionary whom the faithful called Cố Tân.

The poor, unschooled boy began a new life at the side of his foreign teacher.

At Bầu Nọ he helped Father Tân. He learned the catechism and then learned to teach it to others, with all he had been given. He lacked the long schooling many seminarians had, but he had devotion, hard work and love for those seeking the faith.

There is a saying: “Only the wise know how to give themselves to the truth, to gain an eternal inheritance.” Truật had little learning, but he had that wisdom.

On June 20, 1837, soldiers came to Bầu Nọ hunting for priests. Young Truật was held at the village communal hall and questioned about where Father Tân was hiding.

He was only twenty, facing soldiers, under torture. He knew where his teacher was, and he would not tell.

He was put in the cangue and taken to Sơn Tây together with the catechist Peter Trương Văn Đường and the catechist Paul Nguyễn Văn Mỹ.

He was sentenced to death by strangling, to be held until the sentence was carried out. He spent more than a year in prison.

During that time the bishop formally named him a catechist, to encourage him and honor his faithfulness. It was not a promotion in the worldly sense. It was the Church recognizing a young man who had given his whole life to serving the community.

There was probably no ceremony, no new clothes, no celebration, only a message slipped into the prison. But for Truật it must have been a great joy.

On December 18, 1838, after receiving the sacraments, the catechist Peter Truật was strangled at the execution ground near Đò Voi hill, in the Mông Phụ area, together with the catechist Đường and the catechist Mỹ. He was only twenty-one.

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

The catechist Truật had no diplomas and little education. He was a poor, fatherless boy whom a priest took in out of love. But he learned the most important thing of all: to love God and to be faithful to the one he loved.

And he kept secret the hiding place of the teacher who had taken him in. That was how a poor boy repaid kindness: with faithfulness unto death.