Saint Andrew Dung-Lac and Companions

Martyrs

Feast Day

November 24

Life

1795–1839

Canonized

1988

Order

Diocesan priest (Andrew Dung-Lac)

Born

Bac Ninh Province, Tonkin (modern Vietnam)

This memorial honors 117 martyrs of Vietnam canonized by Pope Saint John Paul II on June 19, 1988: 96 Vietnamese (eight bishops, fifty priests, and thirty-eight laymen and laywomen, including catechists and members of the Confraternity of the Holy Rosary), 11 Spanish Dominicans (six bishops and five priests), and 10 French priests of the Paris Foreign Missions Society. They represent the visible part of an immense persecution: between 1745 and 1862 an estimated 130,000 Vietnamese Christians were put to death, banished, or stripped of property under successive Le, Tay Son, and Nguyen emperors who saw the Catholic faith as a foreign and subversive presence.

The patron of the group, Saint Andrew Dung-Lac, was a Vietnamese diocesan priest born around 1795 to non-Christian parents in Bac Ninh province. Sold by his impoverished family to a catechist, he was baptized at age twelve and ordained priest in 1823. He served as parish pastor in several Tonkin villages, was twice arrested and ransomed, and was finally beheaded for the faith at Hanoi on December 21, 1839. The companions died variously by beheading, strangulation, dismemberment, burning, or being caged and starved between 1745 and 1862. Their common feast was set at November 24, the date of the death of one of the prominent group, Saint Joseph Marchand. Pope Leo XIII beatified the first group in 1900; further beatifications followed under Pius X (1906, 1909) and Pius XII (1951), and Saint John Paul II united all 117 in a single canonization in 1988.