Saint Matthew Lê Văn Gẫm

The merchant who died that day in the heart of the South was Matthew Lê Văn Gẫm, the saint of business people, traders and seafarers in the Church in Vietnam. He was not a soldier or a monk; he was a man who traded by sailing ship. Yet he dared to use his ship and his life for something extraordinary: braving dangerous seas and slipping past the royal navy’s blockade to carry missionaries, bishops and seminarians in and out of the country, keeping the lifeblood of faith flowing for the Church in Vietnam in its darkest hour.

At twenty, at his parents’ wish, he married a devout local woman, and they had four children. After his first wife died, he remarried and had one more child. Matthew Gẫm took over his father’s trade, building large sailing ships to carry rice, sugar and farm produce from the South to the provinces of the center, and as far as Singapore and the Malay Peninsula. Such voyages demanded long experience of tides, monsoon winds and channels, and not every trader dared risk them, especially since the East Sea was then full of pirates and closely watched by the court. He was a scrupulously honest merchant who never cheated on weights or measures, helped poor boatmen generously, and was trusted by everyone. Those long voyages, sometimes months at sea, made him fearless and at home with danger, and that would prepare him for a mission far greater than trading rice and sugar.

From 1844 to 1846, Matthew Gẫm’s ship made many daring secret voyages. He disguised it as an ordinary rice boat, lost among the hundreds of boats crowding the southern waters every day, so that no one would suspect what was hidden below deck. He secretly took Bishop Lefèbvre across the sea to safety in Singapore, carried Vietnamese seminarians to the major seminary at Penang in Malaya, and brought back liturgical objects, prayer books and letters. The Gò Công merchant’s ship became the one lifeline that kept the Church in the South from being cut off.

They were all put in cangues and taken under guard to the prison in Saigon. Under pressure from French warships anchored off Đà Nẵng, Emperor Thiệu Trị’s court was forced to deport Bishop Lefèbvre to Singapore. But all the court’s fury fell on the Vietnamese merchant Matthew Lê Văn Gẫm, for in the mandarins’ eyes, a Vietnamese who dared help a “Western master of religion” was even more guilty than the foreign missionaries.

The high mandarins tried every threat and inducement: “You are a rich trader with a beautiful wife and clever children. Why be such a fool as to bring in Westerners and bring death on yourself? Just step over the cross once, and I will give you back your ship and let you go back to trading as before!” Matthew Lê Văn Gẫm raised his head and answered firmly:

“Your Excellencies, I carried the missionaries out of love for God’s religion, not to plot against the court! I am a Catholic; I would rather lose all my ships, all my wealth and even my life than ever betray my God!”

Unable to shake his faith, Emperor Thiệu Trị’s court sentenced him to be beheaded. Through the long months in prison awaiting death, Matthew Gẫm kept a remarkable cheerfulness. He encouraged his fellow prisoners and shared the food his family brought with those who were poor and hungry. When his wife and children came to visit him, weeping bitterly, he tenderly wiped his wife’s tears and told her:

“Go home and take good care of the children, and teach them to hold fast to the faith... Don’t worry about me; going to die for God is a great blessing for our whole family!”

On May 27, 1900, Pope Leo XIII beatified him. On June 19, 1988, in Rome, Pope Saint John Paul II canonized Matthew Lê Văn Gẫm together with one hundred sixteen other Vietnamese Martyrs. The Church celebrates him on May 11 each year, and on November 24.