24 November: Saints Andrew Dung-Lac and 106 Companion Martyrs
Witnesses of Christ unto the sacrifice of their lives
Beginning in the early decades of the sixteenth century, the proclamation of the Gospel reached the regions of present-day Vietnam, and in 1659 the Holy See gave stable form to missionary activity by entrusting two vast areas to the Apostolic Vicariates of the North (Đàng Ngoài) and the South (Đàng Trong). Despite difficulties and hostility, that work eventually produced a remarkable growth of the Christian community.
From the very beginning, however, the growth of the Church became intertwined with fierce persecutions: European missionaries as well as local priests and faithful paid with their lives for their witness. For nearly three centuries — from 1625 until 1886 — the rulers of the Trịnh and Nguyễn dynasties, along with various emperors, issued numerous decrees of repression, fifty-three in total. About 130,000 Christians were killed in different parts of the country. During the reign of Minh Mạng (from 1821), anyone who gave refuge to a Catholic risked being sentenced to death.
Hostility intensified as well under Emperor Tự Đức (1847–1883), who viewed everything coming from the West with suspicion. He set silver rewards for those who helped capture a missionary and ordered that, once executed, their bodies be thrown into the river. Vietnamese priests and foreign catechists were often beheaded; local catechists had the words tà đạo (“false religion”) branded on their cheeks to expose them to public scorn. Christians who apostatized by trampling on the cross could save their lives, while the others faced imprisonment, exile, or death. Numerous families were separated, their goods confiscated, and they were deported to distant, non-Christian regions.
Over time, the Church has been able to reconstruct with precision the life and death of only a portion of these victims, choosing 117 witnesses of the faith to represent that multitude of martyrs. Among them was the priest Andrew Dung-Lac. They were beatified in several stages: 64 by Pope Leo XIII in 1900; 8 by Saint Pius X in 1906; another 20 by the same Pontiff in 1909; and finally 25 by Pius XII in 1951. On 18 April 1986, all these causes were brought together into a single process and, after recognition of the signs and miracles attributed to their intercession (5 June 1986), Saint John Paul II canonized them on 19 June 1988. Their common memorial is set for 24 November, the date on which three of them suffered martyrdom. The same Pope proclaimed them Patrons of Vietnam with the apostolic letter Si quidem cunctis of 14 December 1990.
Although many of them were buried without names, the Christian community has kept the memory of these witnesses alive. Among the 117 canonized martyrs are 11 Spaniards of the Dominican Order (6 bishops and 5 priests), 10 French missionaries of the Paris Foreign Missions (2 bishops and 8 priests), and 96 Vietnamese, including 37 priests — 11 of them Dominicans — and 59 laypeople: one seminarian, 16 catechists, 10 Dominican tertiaries, and one woman.