Today, the church celebrates the feast of Saint Andrew Dung-Lac and Companions. Although one man, a priest gives his name to today’s feast, Saint Andrew Dung-Lac stands for 117 Vietnamese faithful martyred in Vietnam between 1820 and 1862. Among them were bishops, priests many lay people, mother of six and a nine year old child who gave their lives for Christ.
Andrew Dung-Lac, a Catholic convert ordained to the priesthood, was born as Dung An-Tran to an ordinary family in northern Vietnam around the year 1795. The family followed the traditional religion of Vietnam. When An-Tran was twelve, his family moved to Hanoi to look for work. There the boy met a Christian, a catechist who housed him and taught him about Jesus CHrist. The boy was baptized with the name Andrew. In 1823, Andrew was ordained a priest and his preaching and simplicity of life led many others to baptism. This time was a dangerous time to be a Christian in Vietnam.
Christianity was brought to Vietnam by the Portuguese. Jesuits opened the first permanent mission at Da Nang in 1615. They ministered to Japanese Catholics who had been driven from Japan. Severe persecutions were launched at least three times in the 19th century. During the six decades after 1820, between 100,000 and 300,000 Catholics were killed or subjected to great hardship. Foreign missionaries martyred in the first wave included priests of the Paris Mission Society, and Spanish Dominican priests and tertiaries.
In 1832, Emperor Minh-Mang banned all foreign missionaries, and tried to make all Vietnamese deny their faith by trampling on a crucifix. Many hiding places like caves were offered in homes of the faithful to the priests.
Persecution broke out again in 1847, when the emperor suspected foreign missionaries and Vietnamese Christians of sympathizing with a rebellion led by of one of his sons. That year a treaty with France guaranteed religious freedom to Catholics, but it did not stop all persecution.
Fr. Andrew was first arrested in 1835, but his parishioners ransomed him. He changed his last name to Lac and moved to a different region to avoid persecution, but persecution followed him. In 1839, he was arrested again along with another Vietnamese priest, Fr. Peter Thi, whom Fr. Andrew had visited in order to go to confession. The two were ransomed, then arrested again, tortured, and finally beheaded in Hanoi on December 21, 1839.
The group of 117, canonized together by Pope John Paul II in 1988, in turn stands for a nameless multitude estimated at between 100,000 and 300,000 martyrs, the “great cloud of witnesses” whose blood was the seed of a thriving Church in the land of Vietnam.
