Saints Andrew Dung-Lac and Companions

Saints Andrew Dung-Lac and Companions are 117 martyrs who, between 1745 and 1862, gave their lives for Christ in Tonkin, Annam, and Cochinchina, the lands of present-day Vietnam. Among them are 8 bishops, 50 priests, and 59 lay faithful. The Church commemorates them together on November 24.

The Gospel had been preached in Vietnam since the sixteenth century. Over the three centuries that followed, the rulers of the country banned the Christian faith again and again: between 1645 and 1886, fifty-three edicts were issued against it, and the number of victims is estimated at about 130,000. The faithful were ordered to trample on the cross as a sign of apostasy. The martyrs chose exile, prison, torture, and death instead. As many as 108 of the 117 saints died in the nineteenth century, under the emperors Minh Mang and Tu Duc.

Among those canonized are 96 Vietnamese, 11 Spanish Dominicans, and 10 Frenchmen of the Paris Foreign Missions Society. The lay people were for the most part fathers of families, and beside them catechists, a seminarian, and one woman, Agnes Le Thi Thanh, a mother of six. Seventy-five of the martyrs were beheaded and 22 strangled; the others were burned alive, died of mutilation, or died in prison as a result of torture.

Andrew Dung-Lac, whose name heads their list, was born around 1795. His parents were pagans and lived in extreme poverty. As a child he was entrusted to a catechist, received baptism, became a catechist himself, and in 1823 a priest. He was a parish priest and missionary in various places. More than once he was put in prison, and the faithful ransomed him. To hide, he took the name Lac. He used to say that whoever dies for the faith goes to heaven.

In 1839 he was arrested together with Father Peter Truong Van Thi, to whom he had come to make his confession. Both refused to trample on the cross, and on December 21, 1839, they were beheaded in Hanoi. Another of the martyrs, the priest Paul Le-Bao-Tinh, wrote from prison that amid his torments he was, by the grace of God, full of joy, because he was not alone: Christ was with him. Benedict XVI quoted this letter in the encyclical Spe salvi.

The martyrs were beatified in four groups: Leo XIII beatified 64 of them in 1900, Pius X eight in 1906 and twenty in 1909, and Pius XII twenty-five in 1951. John Paul II canonized them all together on June 19, 1988, in Saint Peter’s Square. It was at that time the largest canonization in the history of the Church. Their common memorial falls on November 24, the day on which three of them died in 1838: Bishop Peter Dumoulin-Borie and the priests Peter Vo Dang Khoa and Vincent Nguyen The Diem.

In 1990 John Paul II declared the holy martyrs patrons of the Church in Vietnam. In the canonization homily he recalled the ancient saying that the blood of martyrs is the seed of Christians, and he told Vietnamese Catholics that it is for them a source of grace for growing in faith.