Feast day: November 24
Sts. Andrew Dung-Lac & Companions
A Vietnamese priest and the great host of martyrs of Vietnam — priests, bishops, and lay Catholics, native and foreign — who died in waves of persecution over more than a century.
The feast of St. Andrew Dung-Lac and his Companions honours the Martyrs of Vietnam — a great company of one hundred and seventeen saints, canonized together, who died for the faith in that land across three centuries of persecution, from the seventeenth into the nineteenth.
Christianity had taken deep root in Vietnam through the work of missionaries, but successive rulers and dynasties saw the foreign faith as a threat and unleashed wave after wave of savage persecution. The death toll over those centuries ran to the tens, even hundreds, of thousands; the hundred and seventeen canonized martyrs stand for them all.
Andrew Dung-Lac, who gives the group its name, was a Vietnamese diocesan priest, born of poor and pagan parents, converted and educated by a catechist, who served his people faithfully and was beheaded in 1839. The martyrs as a whole were a cross-section of the Vietnamese Church: most were native Vietnamese — priests, catechists, and laypeople, including soldiers, farmers, and mothers — alongside missionary bishops and priests from Spain and France.
They suffered cruelly, by beheading, strangling, and worse, often after long imprisonment in chains and torture meant to make them trample on a crucifix. Canonized by Pope John Paul II in 1988, they are honoured as the witnesses on whose blood the vigorous Church of Vietnam was built.
They number one hundred and seventeen canonized martyrs, but stand for as many as a hundred and thirty thousand Vietnamese Christians who died for the faith.
Image: Nheyob (cropped by Rabanus Flavus) (CC BY-SA 3.0), via Wikimedia Commons.
Source: vatican.va/news_services/liturgy/saints/ns_lit_doc_19880619_martiri_vietnam_fr.html
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