Before you meet each one

The number 117 sounds tidy and round, like a column of people standing in line. But come closer and you see each face. A village healer in Quảng Bình who gave medicine to the poor free of charge. A mother in Ninh Bình with six children. A soldier from Huế who wove silk for the court. A carpenter who rang the church bell every day. An eighteen-year-old seminarian. And white-haired bishops from Spain and France who had lived in this land longer than in their own.

They lived in different villages, in different decades. Some could read Chinese characters, some had never been to school. Some were born into Catholic families, some came to God at thirty. Just one thing ties them together: when forced to choose between their lives and their faith, they did not abandon God.

In Christian tradition, the word “martyr” first of all means a witness. Anyone who lives uprightly, loves others, and is faithful to God each day is bearing witness. Martyrs bear witness to the very end: they accept death rather than deny what they believe. The Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraph 2473, calls this the supreme witness to the truth of the faith.

But martyrdom does not mean going in search of death. Reading their lives, we meet again and again priests who had to hide in pits, in sugarcane fields, in piles of straw, disguised as hired hands pulling weeds. They wanted to live, because their flock still needed them. Only when there was no other way, or when they saw others being beaten in their place, did they step out.

Nor were they people who knew no fear. Some weakened at first and stepped over the cross, then came back in anguish and stood firm until death. The Church does not hide those falls. They make the martyrs’ courage more real, and closer to us.

The Gospel came to Vietnam through several waves of mission. In the early seventeenth century, Catholic communities took shape in both Cochinchina and Tonkin. In 1659, the Holy See established the first two apostolic vicariates, two mission territories cared for by representatives of the Holy See.

From the very first days, the Vietnamese did not stand on the sidelines. Catechists taught the catechism, translated books, and went ahead of the priests to prepare the way. Parish elders and village headmen looked after the communities, kept the churches, and hid the priests. Mothers taught their children to pray. Families opened their homes to shelter priests, knowing the price could be their very lives. So the story of the martyr saints is not only the story of foreign missionaries. It is the story of a whole people who received the faith, and kept it with their own blood.

The attitude of the ruling dynasties toward the Catholic faith changed with the times. There were periods of relative peace, such as the reign of Gia Long, when seminaries were reopened and churches were built. And there were periods of relentless persecution.

The earliest martyrs among the 117 died under the Trịnh lords, in 1745 and in 1773. Then came the Tây Sơn period, in 1798. But most of them died under the three reigns of Minh Mạng, Thiệu Trị and Tự Đức, between 1833 and 1862.

The rulers of the day looked at this religion from the West with many fears: for public order, for their power to govern, for ties with foreigners. Toward the end of that period, when French and Spanish warships arrived at Đà Nẵng in 1858, fear turned into suspicion. Catholics were easily seen as agents of the enemy.

But reading their lives, we see plainly that the opposite was true. There was a squad leader who volunteered to fight the invaders and refused only to offer incense and step over the cross. There was an old priest of eighty who urged the faithful not to take up arms. There was a bishop who forbade the faithful to join an uprising. There was a man who declared before the mandarin: I always obey the king and the mandarins in all that is right; I simply cannot deny my God. They did not die for opposing their country. They died because they would not betray their faith.

Nor were all the mandarins cruel. There was a provincial governor who looked for a way to save an old priest. There were guards whose hearts softened, who let the faithful visit, and even asked to become Catholics. There was a man not of the faith who stepped forward to bury a bishop. Even in the darkness, human kindness still flickered.

In these stories, some words come up again and again. Understanding them a little helps us imagine what the martyrs went through.

“Stepping over the cross” was the public gesture prisoners were forced to make to show they had given up the faith. Just one step. And hundreds chose to die rather than take that step.

Beheading, strangling with a cord, slow dismemberment, the “hundred cuts”: the last two were the cruelest punishments of that time. Some were burned alive in bamboo cages. Some died in prison of hunger, illness or old age before their sentence could be carried out.

“Dispersal” was the policy under Emperor Tự Đức from 1861: Catholics were driven out of their villages, their houses and fields confiscated, and sent to live scattered among non-Christian villages under watch. Many also had the words “Tả Đạo” (“false religion”) carved on one cheek, and the name of their home village on the other, so that wherever they went they could not hide. One old man found a way to erase those words, and asked a fellow prisoner to carve two others: “Chính Đạo”, true religion.

We mention these things not to tell horror stories, but so that we know how much the martyrs loved God.

On June 19, 1988, in Saint Peter’s Square in Rome, Pope John Paul II canonized the 117 Vietnamese martyrs. They died between 1745 and 1862.

The number 117 is not the total of Vietnamese Catholics who died for the faith. Over the centuries, far more fell, most of them with no one left to remember their names. The 117 are those whose cases the Church examined carefully and officially honored. In a sense, they stand for a whole host of nameless witnesses.

Of the 117, 96 were Vietnamese and 21 were foreign missionaries: 11 Spaniards, most of them Dominicans, and 10 French members of the Paris Foreign Missions Society.

By state of life, there were 8 bishops, 50 priests, 14 catechists, 1 seminarian and 44 laypeople. A catechist was a layperson trained to teach the catechism and help with the mission, not a priest. A seminarian is someone studying to become a priest. The only seminarian was Saint Thomas Trần Văn Thiện, just eighteen years old.

Among the 44 laypeople were a judge, a canton chief, village headmen, parish elders, healers, soldiers, fishermen, a tailor, a carpenter, farmers and hired laborers. And there was only one woman: Saint Agnes Lê Thị Thành, a mother of six who died in prison for sheltering priests.

They were not honored in a single day. The Holy See beatified them group by group: in 1900, in 1906, in 1909 and in 1951. Then in 1988, all 117 were brought together and canonized at once.

The common feast of the Vietnamese Martyrs is November 24. In addition, each one has their own feast day, tied to the day they went home to heaven.

One more note: Blessed Andrew of Phú Yên, the young martyr who died in 1644, is a very important witness for the Church in Vietnam. He was beatified in 2000, and so is not among the 117 canonized in 1988.

Reading the 117 stories, we find threads linking one person to another.

In the village of Quần Cống, Nam Định, there is “Nhất gia tam Thánh”, one family, three saints: the old judge Khảm, his son Luke Thìn who went astray and was drawn back by his father, and Cai Tả who forgave the debts of the poor. Three from one household, who died together on the same day.

At Ngọc Cục, five men from the same village, two of them brothers, were arrested on the same day, prayed the Rosary together in the prison of Bạch Cốc, and went to the execution ground on the same morning. At Kẻ Báng, three priests and the two laymen who sheltered them went home to heaven on the same day. At Cổ Mễ, five men, two catechists and three laymen, turned the prison of Bắc Ninh into a place where more than forty people were baptized.

There are pairs of teacher and disciple who would not be parted: Father Tự and Brother Úy, the disciple who asked to “die with you, Father”; Father Jaccard and the young seminarian Thiện, strangled together in Quảng Trị; the catechist Peter Tự, who asked to follow Bishop Cao into prison. There are hosts and guests who went to the execution ground together, like the healer Phượng and Father Hoan, who had stayed in his house.

And there are those who fell and rose again: three soldiers who gave back their reward money and walked to the capital to present a petition asking to keep their faith; the old catechist Thomas Toán, who twice weakened, then knelt to kiss the cross and died in prison; Peter Thuần, lifted up by his fellow prisoners after once denying the faith.

The martyr saints were not born saints. Before their last day, they had whole lives: fishing, healing the sick, plowing fields, teaching, raising children, looking after village affairs. Some were gentle, some were headstrong. Some were clever, some could never learn their lessons. Some had been afraid, some had done wrong.

So when you read about them, please do not look only at the execution ground. Look also at the wife weeping by the roadside, the mother asking her son whether he owed anyone anything so she could pay it for him, the child being beaten while the priest could not stay hidden in the sugarcane field. Look at the hands that wiped away other people’s tears even in a dark prison.

And perhaps, after reading, we will ask ourselves: the faith they paid for with their lives, how am I keeping it today?