Saint Thomas Trần Văn Thiện

Standing around the execution ground were not only soldiers with swords and spears. There was also the governor, the man who had come down to the prison himself to work on the young man, not with the lash but with promises that would make any eighteen-year-old waver: an official post, a beautiful daughter for a wife, an income for life, if only he would step over a piece of wood in the shape of a cross laid in front of him.

“I seek only titles in heaven, and care nothing for titles on earth,” he said. “I would rather die in poverty for the name of Christ than ever put on the brocade robe of glory that comes with betrayal.”

That young man was Thomas Trần Văn Thiện, a seminarian who had not finished even his first year, who had never taught anyone the catechism or been ordained to any order. Yet the Church later chose him as patron of Vietnamese youth and seminarians, perhaps precisely because he had no time to do anything great. He had time for only one thing: to hold firm to a single “no” before the greatest temptation of his life, at the very age when people are most easily swayed.

From childhood Thiện was unlike the other village children, not because he was aloof or cold, but because he had a calm rarely seen at that age. He learned Chinese characters and the Vietnamese script quickly, knew his catechism by heart long before the others, and was so obedient and well-behaved that all the adults in the village loved him.

Just then young Thomas Thiện, knowing nothing of all this, was walking down from Quảng Bình with a small bundle holding a few clothes and a prayer book, his rosary in his fingers, heading for Di Loan in the hope of being admitted.

The soldiers lying in wait around the village found him suspicious, a young stranger, soberly dressed, carrying a rosary, and stopped him at once. Was he a Catholic? Was he looking for the priests?

For soldiers hunting for any trace of the Catholic faith, that answer was as good as giving himself up. They cheered as if they had won a great prize, locked a cangue around the eighteen-year-old’s neck and chains on his legs, and marched him off to the provincial prison of Quảng Trị.

“My son, you are so young, with a bright future opening before you,” the governor said, almost like a worried father speaking to his son. “Why foolishly follow a false religion and bring on yourself a death that will leave your bones to rot in this prison? Listen to me: just step over that cross once, and I will set you free at once. I will adopt you as my son, give you my own beloved daughter in marriage, and arrange a high post for you at court so that you can bring glory to your family.”

“Your Excellency, I thank you with all my heart for your kindness... But I long only to be united with Christ in eternity, and care nothing for an earthly marriage. I seek only the glorious titles of heaven, and care nothing for the passing titles of earth. The Cross is where my Lord died to redeem me; I worship and adore Him — how could I dare trample on the One who is the source of my life?”

At that answer the governor dropped his gentle manner. He had the young man’s shirt stripped off, tied him tightly to a wooden post in the middle of the courtroom, and ordered forty strokes of the rattan. Each stroke tore the young flesh, and blood spread over the earthen floor. Thiện bit his lip. He did not complain or beg; he only called softly on the name of Jesus for strength to endure.

For Thiện, sharing a cell with a missionary priest was a blessing he had never dared to dream of. In that damp, cramped, dark prison, Father Jaccard became his last teacher: not in the classroom he had hoped for at Di Loan, but among chains and floggings. The priest taught him to pray more deeply, explained the meaning of suffering for the faith, and prayed with him every night, when the only light in the cell was the faint glow of the moon through a crack in the wooden door.

Thiện cared for Father Jaccard as a son cares for his father, giving him his meager share of rice and cleaning the wounds the lash had left on the aging missionary’s body. The two of them, one old and one young, one a foreigner and the other a boy from Trung Quán, turned the little time they had left into a retreat deeper perhaps than anything Thiện would have known had he been admitted to Di Loan as he first intended.

“My dear Mother! Do not grieve that I must wear chains for the name of God... To die for Christ is a great and everlasting blessing! Thank God and trust firmly in Him... I will see you again in our blessed heavenly Homeland!”

His body was buried right at the execution ground of Nhan Biều. In 1847, his remains, together with those of many other martyrs, were reburied in the chapel of the Paris Foreign Missions Society. Today his relics are still venerated in many places in the archdiocese of Huế and in the religious communities that have him as their patron.

On May 27, 1900, Pope Leo XIII beatified him. And on June 19, 1988, Pope John Paul II canonized Thomas Trần Văn Thiện, together with one hundred sixteen other Vietnamese Martyrs, in Rome. The Church celebrates him on September 21 each year.