St. Andrew Dũng-Lạc and Companions

Biography

The Gospel reached Vietnam in the sixteenth century, and by the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries a flourishing Catholic community had grown up. Over the next two centuries, especially under the emperors Minh Mạng, Thiệu Trị, and Tự Đức in the nineteenth century, Christians were repeatedly persecuted. Churches were destroyed, believers were forced to trample on the cross, and many were imprisoned, exiled, or killed. Historians estimate that between 100,000 and 300,000 Catholics died. On June 19, 1988, Pope St. John Paul II canonized 117 of these martyrs, who died between 1745 and 1862: 96 Vietnamese, 11 Spanish Dominican missionaries, and 10 French missionaries of the Paris Foreign Missions Society. They included bishops, priests, seminarians, catechists, and lay men and women. St. Andrew Dũng-Lạc, born around 1795 in northern Vietnam as Trần An Dũng, was baptized as a young man, became a catechist, and was ordained a priest in 1823. He served his people tirelessly and was arrested several times; he changed his name to Lạc to avoid capture. He was beheaded in Hanoi on December 21, 1839. Among his companions are St. Théophane Vénard, a young French priest who wrote tender letters to his family before his death in 1861, and St. Agnes Lê Thị Thành, a mother of six who died in prison in 1841.

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