Saint Vincent Phạm Hiếu Liêm

Around him were not only soldiers and curious onlookers. In the crowd stood mandarins who had once faced him in debate at the lord’s palace, unable to hide their sorrow. The executioner stepped forward. The priest smiled and gave a slight nod, then lifted his eyes to heaven and recited the Creed aloud, first in Latin and then in Vietnamese, before calmly offering his neck to the sword.

He was Father Vincent Phạm Hiếu Liêm, known in religion as Vincent of Peace, the first Vietnamese Dominican priest to shed his blood for the faith. Only a few weeks earlier, this same man had spent three whole days and nights in Lord Trịnh’s palace debating theology as an equal with representatives of Confucianism, Buddhism and Taoism, in what came to be called the Council of the Four Religions.

From childhood Liêm was remarkably bright. He picked things up at once, mastered the Four Books and Five Classics under the region’s best-known teachers, and was writing poetry before any of his friends. At twelve he asked to join the mission house at Lục Thủy to learn Latin and try out the religious life.

He learned Spanish and Latin and completed the course in scholastic philosophy and theology based on the thought of Saint Thomas Aquinas, after whom the school was named. Among hundreds of students from Spain and the colonies, the young Vietnamese stood out for his sharp mind, his closely reasoned eloquence and a humility his professors could not fail to notice.

In September 1753 he made his profession in the Order of Preachers, the Dominicans, at the friary of Santo Domingo in the heart of Manila, taking the religious name Vincent of Peace (Vicente de la Paz). In 1758, at twenty-six, he was ordained a priest, with a doctorate in theology, an honor few Vietnamese of his time had ever achieved.

In those years Lord Trịnh Sâm was tightening the edicts against the faith in Tonkin. For fourteen years, from 1758 to 1772, the doctor of theology from one of the best schools in Asia lived a life nothing like what his degree might have brought him: disguised as a peasant, he paddled through the creeks night after night to say Mass, hear confessions and teach the catechism to the faithful in the dark.

What set Father Vincent Liêm apart was the way he used his deep Confucian learning to open a conversation with the scholar class, who tended to regard the Catholic faith with suspicion as a foreign religion that threatened the moral order. He patiently explained that the faith did not reject filial piety or the good traditions of the nation; it brought filial piety to its fullness.

In those years a priest in Tonkin had to be always looking over his shoulder. By day Father Vincent Liêm might be just a man in a conical hat with his trousers rolled up to the knee, paddling a basket boat with a few bundles of firewood or baskets of fish between the river landings, like hundreds of other fishermen on that stretch of river. Only when night fell and the boat put in at a hidden landing did he quietly step ashore and slip into a house arranged beforehand, where a few dozen faithful sat waiting by an oil lamp turned down as low as it would go. Such a Mass might last less than an hour, yet it took days of preparation and watchfulness by a whole Catholic neighborhood: someone watching the road, someone watching the landing, someone ready to sound the alarm on a bamboo whistle at the sight of a stranger.

In the middle of that anxious life, Father Vincent Liêm was more than once questioned by the village scholars themselves. They prized learning, so they were more inclined to respect a man who had earned degrees as far away as the Philippines than to fear him. Over tea and wine they would sometimes invite him to debate just for the pleasure of it, to see how this learned priest would answer hard questions about the three bonds and the five constant virtues. More than once, after such harmless-seeming conversations, a scholar quietly began to look further into the Catholic faith and little by little asked to learn the catechism. It was a slow, patient sowing, quite unlike the noisy public preaching people often imagine.

His arguments, learned and gentle, left the representatives of Confucianism, Buddhism and Taoism with no answer. Even Lord Trịnh Sâm’s mother, who had organized the debate, could not hide her admiration for the Vietnamese priest’s gifts.

When the sentence was announced, Father Vincent Liêm did not flinch. He turned to Father Gia and said with a smile:

“Father, we are about to drink to the full the cup of rejoicing with Jesus in the Kingdom of Heaven.”