Saint Matthew Lê Văn Gẫm

Saint Matthew Lê Văn Gẫm was a Vietnamese merchant, a lay Catholic who carried missionaries and seminarians in his boat. Arrested for this in 1846, he was beheaded in Saigon after a year in prison. The Church commemorates him on May 11.

He was born around 1813 in the village of Long Đại in the province of Biên Hòa, in Cochinchina, the southern part of present-day Vietnam. He came from the local Catholic community and was the eldest of six children. He married, and according to the biography published by the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of Vietnam, he and his wife had four children. He worked as a merchant and was often away traveling. He had his own boat and knew the rivers and sea routes well.

At that time Christianity was forbidden in the Vietnamese state, and under the emperors Minh Mạng and Thiệu Trị many faithful and missionaries gave their lives for the faith. Yet the Church in Cochinchina needed priests. At the Church’s request, Matthew carried by sea missionaries arriving from Europe as well as priests and seminarians traveling abroad, among other places to Singapore. He made several such voyages without incident.

In 1846 he sailed to Singapore to fetch Bishop Lefebvre, the vicar apostolic, together with a priest and three seminarians. His boat also carried liturgical objects. On the way back, off the coast, a military patrol stopped the boat and found European missionaries on board. Matthew, as the owner and captain of the boat, was held to be the main culprit and was imprisoned.

He was interrogated and beaten many times to make him renounce his faith. He replied that he would rather accept death than abandon the faith he had kept since childhood. After a year in prison, by order of Emperor Thiệu Trị, he was beheaded in Saigon on May 11, 1847, at the execution ground near what is now Chợ Đũi. A small shrine marks the place of his martyrdom in present-day Ho Chi Minh City.

Matthew is one of the 117 Martyrs of Vietnam. Pope Leo XIII beatified him on May 27, 1900, and John Paul II canonized him together with the others on June 19, 1988. The Church commemorates the Martyrs of Vietnam together on November 24, while the Roman Martyrology lists Matthew on the day of his death. In the Archdiocese of Saigon a parish bears his name.