Saint Peter Lê Tùy

So many people came that they packed the whole ground: not only Christians but non-Christians from the area too, many of whom had once been given medicine by the old man without paying a single coin. Among the crowd stood mandarins and soldiers who had guarded him in prison, unable to hide their red eyes.

Before doing his work, the executioner knelt in front of the old man. “Grandfather, I am only carrying out my superiors’ orders; please forgive me.” The old man smiled and gently patted the man’s shoulder with his thin hand.

“Do your duty with an easy heart, my son. I forgive you and I wish you every peace.”

The man with that smile was Father Peter Lê Tùy, the first priest of the Archdiocese of Hà Nội to die a martyr. He spent more than thirty years as a priest traveling through poor villages, from the plains of the North all the way to distant Nghệ An and Hà Tĩnh, and he fell at sixty not in fury and struggle but with a smile of forgiveness that made even his executioners bow their heads.

From childhood Tùy was gentle and quiet, worked hard in the fields, and loved prayer far more than children’s games. At twelve he asked his parents to let him enter the “House of God” at the parish of Kẻ Đầm, to learn Chinese characters and Latin and to test a vocation to the priesthood. Seeing that the boy stood far above his companions in virtue, his superiors sent him on to study philosophy and theology at the school of Kẻ Vĩnh.

At twenty-five, Tùy was received as a catechist, the first stage of a long road to the priesthood, which meant years of devoted service beside the missionaries, walking every village path to teach children the catechism and baptize the dying. In 1803, at thirty, the catechist Peter Tùy was ordained a priest by Bishop Delgado, whom the Vietnamese called Đức cha An, at the seminary of Kẻ Vĩnh.

Over those years Father Peter Tùy became a familiar figure throughout Nghệ An and Hà Tĩnh: not a distant churchman, but a kindly old man who was always there when people needed him most. He lived simply, on rice with vegetables and soy paste, in a rough brown robe worn through at both shoulders. He had a special gift for reading the pulse and preparing traditional herbal remedies from old family recipes. Wherever he went he carried a small bag of medicines, ready to treat anyone for free, Christian or not, and when cholera swept the region, many people owed their lives to those hands.

He was also a teacher for poor children, patiently showing them each stroke of the Chinese characters and the Vietnamese script, each line of the catechism prayers. And he was a confessor known for his gentleness, who would sit for hours in the confessional, listening tirelessly to lost souls finding their way home. Little by little, non-Christians as well as Christians came to call him by an affectionate name: “holy old Tùy”.

To understand what old Father Peter Tùy went through in the last ten years of his life, we need to picture a parish priest’s life in Nghệ An at that time. The parish of Đông Thành had none of the clear boundaries of a parish today. It took in dozens of mission stations scattered among the fields and low hills, sometimes a whole day’s walk apart. A priest caring for such an area could not sit and wait for the faithful to come to him. Whatever his age, in sun or rain, he had to go out to reach the dying in time for anointing, or a sickly newborn in time for baptism, things that could not wait even a day. For a man past fifty and then sixty, each such journey was a quiet sacrifice, to say nothing of doing it all in secret, in the years when the faith was most strictly forbidden.

The faithful on the ferry and on both banks, saw the soldiers rush in and, in their panic, were about to fight to save the old priest. But Father Peter Tùy raised his hand to stop them, his voice as calm as ever:

“Brothers and sisters, be calm. Do not use violence. This is God’s holy will. If God wants me to be arrested and to die for Him, I gladly accept. Go home and pray for me.”

The soldiers tied him up, put a heavy cangue on the sixty-year-old priest’s neck and chains on his legs, and marched him off to the provincial prison of Nghệ An.

“Grandfather, you are sixty years old, your hair and beard are white as snow. Go home and enjoy your old age,” the judge said, pleading more than threatening.

“The court forbids the religion of Jesus very strictly. Out of respect for your age, I do not want to make trouble for you. Just step over this cross once, and I will at once petition the emperor to pardon you and send you home to your village this very day.”

The old priest knelt with his back straight, his hands joined, and answered in the same familiar gentle voice, yet without wavering at all:

“Your Excellency, I am past sixty, with one foot already in the grave — what would I want with this short earthly life? For more than sixty years I have worshiped only God, the Creator who made me, and I have been wholeheartedly loyal to the king and his officials. I have never done anything deceitful or harmful to the people or the country. The Cross is where my Lord died to redeem my soul; I honor and worship Him all my life — how could I dare trample on Him? If you wish to cut off the head of this old body, do so, but I will never deny my God.”

Unable to shake the faith of an old man who had lived nearly a whole lifetime, the mandarins threw him into the dark prison and sent a petition to the capital, Huế, asking for the death sentence.

Little by little, even the jailers and his fellow prisoners were won over by his holiness. They respectfully called him “Cụ Cố”, the Venerable Old Father, and of their own accord brought him rice and water and swept his sleeping place. Whenever the faithful slipped in to visit, it was he who comforted them and dried their tears, urging them to hold fast to the faith, to live in harmony, and to bear no grudge even against those who held him captive.

The faithful of the Trang Nứa community bravely took his body away and buried it. In 1838, at the earnest wish of his home village, his relics were secretly carried back to be buried for good in the village of Bằng Sở itself, where he had been born sixty years before. Today the Saint Peter Lê Tùy Pilgrimage Center at Bằng Sở is a familiar place of pilgrimage, where people of every religion come to ask for blessings.