Saint Emmanuel Lê Văn Phụng

The first to be led out between two rows of soldiers with spears was an old man of sixty-three. He wore a long black gauze tunic and a turban, the dress of a respected village elder, not prison clothes. He stood upright and walked steadily, without a stagger, despite six months in a dark prison. Beside him was a much younger man, only thirty-one, a bamboo cangue around his neck, his hands fingering a worn rosary.

The old man turned to the younger one, his voice strong enough for those nearby to hear:

“Father, you and I have lived side by side serving God, and now we may die side by side for God’s name on this land of our birth — what a boundless blessing.”

People called him Ông Câu Phụng — Emmanuel Lê Văn Phụng, head of the Catholic community of Cù Lao Giêng. The young man beside him was Father Peter Đoàn Công Quý, the priest he had hidden in his home through the most dangerous months.

Ông Câu Phụng had no army behind him and no title beside his name in the court’s registers. He was simply a man who made tables and chairs, built houses and plowed fields to feed nine children, known all over the island by a very ordinary name: the Christian carpenter. Yet that carpenter, standing between life and death, did not desert his post: a father in his home, an elder brother in his community, a man who had promised to shelter others and sheltered them to the end.

Emmanuel Lê Văn Phụng was born in 1796 in the hamlet of Đầu Nước on that island. His father, Emmanuel Lê Văn Kế, and his mother, Maria Nguyễn Thị Nhơn, came from Catholic peasant families who had worked the fields and orchards there for generations. Young Phụng grew up to the sound of flowing water, boats putting in to shore, and the church bell echoing across the canals every morning. He was baptized as a child with the name Emmanuel, “God with us,” a name that, looking back on his life, people later felt suited him strangely well.

He had little schooling and owned no books to speak of apart from a few prayer books. His trade was carpentry: sawing timber, planing boards, making tables and chairs, building houses, work that demands steady hands and a sharp eye but never makes anyone rich. He married a devout woman of the same parish, and they had nine children. The house he built with his own hands from island timber, with a thatched roof and a packed earth floor, was no different from hundreds of others along the riverbank, except that it was always tidy, evening prayers always rose from it, and its door was always open to needy neighbors, whether or not they shared his faith.

People said Phụng was so blunt that he sometimes gave offense, but no one ever heard him tell a lie for his own advantage. When he made a set of tables and chairs, he charged exactly the agreed price, no more and no less. When neighbors ran short of rice before the harvest, he lent it to them without interest. And so, year after year, his standing grew: not the kind that comes from wealth, but the kind people give only to those who have lived uprightly so long that no one doubts them anymore.

But Cù Lao Giêng, cut off by water on every side, became one of the safest hiding places for missionaries and Vietnamese priests. Every boat coming or going had to pass through small creeks with winding bends that only the locals knew by heart; to strangers, especially officials and soldiers from the mainland, it was a watery maze.

He did more than hide people. He also looked after a community of Lovers of the Holy Cross sisters working quietly on the island, providing their lodging and food and keeping watch whenever there were rumors of a patrol. On moonless nights he arranged secret Masses in his own house or in trusted homes nearby, so that the faithful could receive the sacraments they would otherwise have gone without.

He did all this not in a single night but over many years, so quietly that even his non-Christian neighbors had no idea that beneath the old carpenter’s floor a whole hiding network was at work.

At the beginning of 1859, a young priest was sent to care for the Catholics of Đầu Nước: Father Peter Đoàn Công Quý, ordained less than six months before. Ông Câu Phụng took him in and hid him in his own house, as he had hidden so many others. But he cared for this young priest with special tenderness, as one cares for a youngest son just grown up and not yet used to the dangers lurking everywhere. Night after night, when Father Quý paddled out to visit Catholic families in the area, Ông Câu Phụng kept watch, alert to every strange movement on the river, until he saw the priest return safely.

Someone in the area, greedy for the reward offered for denouncing a priest, secretly rowed all the way to the town of Châu Đốc to inform. No one knows exactly who he was. Later records speak only of “a betrayal,” without a name, perhaps because those who wrote down the story did not want to leave a name for later generations to curse, or simply because no one remembered anymore.

They burst in and searched every corner of the house, tied up Ông Câu Phụng in the middle of the yard, and began questioning him with the lash. Father Quý, pressed behind a thin wooden partition, could hear every stroke, and the soldiers roaring that they would tie up the whole family and take them away to be beheaded if Ông Câu Phụng did not reveal who was hiding the priest.

“I am the Christian priest,” he said, his voice not trembling at all. “Spare Ông Câu Phụng and his family; they have done nothing wrong.”

The soldiers froze for a moment, then shouted for joy: the biggest catch had given himself up. They tied up both men at once, seized the prayer books and sacred objects, and marched them down to the boats bound for the prison in Châu Đốc. When the parishioners heard, they rushed to the riverbank and stood in a long line, weeping, as their priest and the man they had trusted for so many years disappeared around the bend of the river, their hands still tied behind their backs.

When the governor learned that Ông Câu Phụng was a well-known landowner of some means and great standing in the region, he changed his tone. Instead of simply torturing him, he tried persuasion and even offered a way out:

“Phụng, you are an honest man who has dealt fairly all your life. Harboring a priest is a serious matter, but I respect you. All I need is for you to declare that you did not know this man was a priest, that you just happened to give a passing traveler lodging, and I will set you free at once to go home to your wife and children.”

It was a door left ajar: one untrue sentence, harmless enough on the face of it, and he could go home to the nine children waiting for him.

“Your Excellency, I am a Catholic; I have been taught always to tell the truth and never to lie. I know very well that he is a priest of God, and I myself freely took him into my home to care for him and serve him. I will never tell a falsehood to save myself.”

The rattan came down at once, dozens of strokes in a row, tearing the old man’s back. Blood spread over the earthen floor of the courtroom. He did not cry out, only clenched his teeth, his lips moving in silent prayers.

News of the torture reached Cù Lao Giêng. His family and the parishioners gathered a large sum of money, probably most of their savings, and took it to Châu Đốc, hoping to buy his release. It often happened at the time: many well-off families saved their relatives in just this way.

But when he heard about it, Ông Câu Phụng called his children and spoke to them with unusual sternness:

“Why bring money to ransom me? I am old now; what use would a few more years of life be? To suffer prison and die for God is the highest honor God has given me. Take that money home and share it with the poor and use it for works of devotion. Let no one try to ransom me again.”

Through the remaining months in that dark prison, Ông Câu Phụng and Father Quý stayed close, like a real father and son. They prayed together every evening and shared their meager rice with prisoners worse off than themselves, and in this way they slowly won over even the hardened jailers.

After the soldiers withdrew, the parishioners carried his body home for burial on Cù Lao Giêng, the land where he was born and grew up, where he built his house and his trade, and where in the end he gave his life to keep the flame of faith from going out. Sixteen years later, in 1875, work began on that same island on a Romanesque stone church. Completed in 1887, it is one of the oldest churches in the Mekong Delta and still stands today, a quiet sign that the blood shed on that island was not shed in vain.

On May 2, 1909, Pope Pius X beatified Ông Câu Emmanuel Lê Văn Phụng. And on June 19, 1988, Pope John Paul II canonized him, together with one hundred sixteen other Vietnamese Martyrs, in Saint Peter’s Square in Rome. The Church celebrates him on July 31 each year.