Saint Andrew Trần An Dũng Lạc

That priest, whose name heads the Vietnamese Martyrs celebrated by the Church every year, was Saint Andrew Trần An Dũng Lạc. His life was one long, patient song. Once a poor, hungry boy whose parents sold him for money to buy rice, he later had to change his name again and again as he went secretly through the night carrying the Eucharist to comfort his flock, and he offered his whole life to God as a cup of thanksgiving.

When Dũng was ten, the family was so poor that his parents could no longer feed their children. In the middle of a famine, the couple sadly took little Dũng to Kẻ Chợ, today’s Hanoi, looking for a way to survive. It is not hard to picture: a father and mother holding their thin son’s hand, walking dozens of kilometers along muddy roads with hunger gnawing at them, not knowing what tomorrow would bring, hoping only to find someone who would take the child in so that he would not starve before their eyes.

For ten long years as a catechist he traveled through the parishes of the Đoài and Đông regions, patiently teaching poor children their prayers and their letters and assisting the missionary priests. It was quiet, unnoticed work that took a perseverance not everyone could keep up for a decade. Seeing his outstanding holiness, his superiors called him to the minor seminary of Kẻ Vĩnh (today Vĩnh Trị parish, Yên Tiến commune, Ý Yên district, Nam Định province) to study philosophy and theology. On March 15, 1823, the catechist Andrew Trần Văn Dũng was ordained a priest.

He was a pastor in stormy times. Emperor Minh Mạng had come to the throne and issued a series of harsh edicts banning the faith throughout the country. Churches and seminaries were torn down, Western missionaries were imprisoned, gathering to pray was strictly forbidden, and Catholic villages were watched and raided by soldiers day and night. It was one of the fiercest persecutions in the history of the Church in Vietnam, lasting from the early nineteenth century until the 1860s and taking the lives of tens of thousands of believers.

In the midst of that danger, Father Andrew Dũng never abandoned his flock. He took off his black cassock and put on the coarse brown clothes of a poor farmer, his legs wrapped in puttees and a torn conical hat on his head. By day he hid in tunnels dug deep beneath the village bamboo hedges, or in the lofts above the buffalo and cattle sheds, where the soldiers seldom searched because of the stench and filth.

At night, when the whole village was asleep, he crept out of hiding and waded across muddy fields from one Catholic family to the next. Sitting on a bamboo bed, he offered a silent Mass by the flicker of an oil lamp, heard confessions, anointed the sick and baptized newborns. Picture a shepherd wading through mud in the pitch dark, always straining to hear a barking dog or a strange footstep, ready to flee at the first sign he had been discovered.

To hide from the mandarins’ soldiers and prowling spies, he changed his name from Dũng to Lạc. He said:

“I changed my name to Lạc — joy — to remind my heart that it is always filled with the Lord’s joy in the midst of countless hardships!”

He lived very simply on rice with sesame salt and boiled water spinach, and whenever the faithful gave him a coin, he at once passed it all on to the poorest families in the parish.

Father Andrew Dũng Lạc held his head high and declared before the mandarins:

“Your Excellencies, from my childhood until now I have worshiped only one God, the Creator who made heaven and earth, and I am wholeheartedly loyal to the king and his officials! I have never committed any wrong that harms the people or the country... But if you order me to trample on the Cross of my Master, then better that you behead me right here, for I will never betray my God!”

Unable to shake the priest’s faith, the furious mandarins threw him into a dark cell to await execution. In that stinking prison, with the cangue weighing on his neck and his body bruised and bitten by mosquitoes and bedbugs, Father Andrew Dũng Lạc stayed wonderfully serene. When a friend wrote asking after him and worrying about what would happen to him, he smiled and sent back a beautiful poem in Nôm script, full of the spirit of the Gospel:

“Winter is over, the season turns, and spring is here; all around, the land grows lush and bright with new life. Wandering the earthly road, my heart has never changed; loyalty and filial love have never left my soul. The heavy cangue I count as light; the sufferings of this world — I can only smile at them! The cup of thanksgiving I will drink to the last drop; radiant Heaven comes to welcome me!”

He saw the cangue on his neck as a victor’s garland, and his coming death as a sweet cup of thanksgiving he was blessed to drink with Jesus. Something in that poem is worth pausing over: in chains and in prison, with death only days away, the prisoner used the traditional poetry of his own people, the Nôm verse every Confucian scholar of the time knew, to express not fear or bitterness but joy.

His name was chosen to head the list of the Vietnamese Martyrs in the liturgical calendar of the universal Church, celebrated every year on November 24. He is remembered not only for himself but on behalf of the hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese believers who shed their blood for the faith over nearly three centuries of persecution, from the time of the Trịnh and Nguyễn lords to the reigns of Minh Mạng, Thiệu Trị and Tự Đức.