Saint Joseph Nguyễn Duy Khang

That catechist was Joseph Nguyễn Duy Khang, one of the hundreds of catechists who quietly carried the work of mission beside foreign missionaries and bishops through the centuries when the Church in Vietnam had to live in the shadows. With no holy orders and no vestments, catechists were the clergy’s right hands: interpreters, guides, boatmen, men who took the lash in place of the bishops and priests they served. Khang was one of them, and he did not leave his post until his last breath.

Young Khang grew up in a devout farming family, a quiet, honest boy, deeply devoted to his parents. While many children his age thought only of going out to the fields to help their families, Khang showed an early longing to give himself to the work of the faith. At fifteen his parish priest sent him to the vicariate’s Latin school, the equivalent of a minor seminary at the time, to learn Chinese characters, Vietnamese script and Latin.

For many years afterward Khang traveled through the remote Catholic villages of Thái Bình, Hải Dương and Nam Định, teaching catechism to new converts and prayers to little children, helping the priests with the sacraments, and caring for poor sick people whom hardly anyone else bothered about.

It was also when the Church in the North entered one of the darkest periods in its history. In 1861 Emperor Tự Đức’s court issued the Phân Sáp decree, a policy meant to root out the Catholic faith entirely. Catholic families were to be split up and scattered among non-Catholic villages where they could be controlled more easily, and each person was to be branded with the words “Tả Đạo” (“false religion”) on the right cheek and the name of their place of exile on the left. From August 1861 the clergy had almost nowhere safe to hide; every village and every roof could become a trap.

Bishop Hermosilla was constantly on the run from one village to another, sometimes hiding for days on end in small boats on the waterways of Hải Dương. Khang was always at his side like a shadow: paddling him to safety in the dead of night, feeling his way across flooded fields to avoid the guard posts, going out to beg a handful of rice here and there for the bishop, who was by then over sixty.

Between the two men, a foreign bishop who had given half his life to the mission and a young catechist from Thái Bình, grew a bond almost like that of father and son. The bishop saw Khang as a son he could trust with his life, and to Khang the bishop was the dearest spiritual father he had ever known.

It is a small detail that says a great deal about the two men: a young catechist, strong enough and quick enough to fight for his life, laid down his weapon at a single word from the man he revered. Obedience in a moment of life and death weighs far more than obedience in peaceful days.

They stripped him, tied him to a wooden post and had him beaten without mercy, hundreds of rattan strokes on his back. Blood streamed down and his flesh was torn open, but Khang clenched his teeth and endured it, without letting slip a single word that could endanger anyone.

Getting nothing, the judges had soldiers clamp iron pincers onto his calves and wrench them, a torment that made him faint in the middle of the courtroom. But as soon as he came to, still moaning with pain, he declared loudly:

“I am only an assistant who follows and serves my bishop. Everything in the vicariate is known to my bishop alone; I know nothing else... I am a man of the Faith; I am ready to die for God’s religion and to die with my bishop, but I will never betray my brothers.”

Powerless against such steadfastness, the judges had him thrown back into prison, in the same cell as Bishop Hermosilla, to await execution. In those last days, in the damp and dark of the cell, Khang went on doing what he had done for years: seeing to every bite and every sip for the frail old bishop and praying with him every night, the two of them encouraging each other to hold fast to the faith to the end.

For more than a month afterward Khang stayed in prison alone, without the bishop. It was perhaps the hardest part of his whole ordeal: the spiritual father he had followed like a shadow was no longer there to pray with him and share a bowl of rice each evening.

Catholics bravely took his body home for an honorable burial in his native village of Trà Vi. On May 20, 1906, Pope Pius X beatified him. And on June 19, 1988, Pope John Paul II canonized Joseph Nguyễn Duy Khang, together with one hundred sixteen other Vietnamese Martyrs, in Rome. The Church celebrates him on December 6 each year, together with thirty-eight other saints of the great Dominican family of Vietnam.