Andrew Dung-Lac and 116 companions, martyred in Vietnam between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Life
Saint Andrew Dung-Lac and Companions are 117 saints who represent the many martyrs who gave their lives for the faith in Vietnam from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century. Among them are Vietnamese priests, catechists and lay people, as well as Spanish Dominican missionaries and French missionaries of the Paris Foreign Missions Society.
Andrew Dung-Lac was born to a poor non-Christian family, served as a catechist and became a priest. During persecution he lived in hiding while caring for the faithful, and in 1839 he was beheaded as a martyr. The martyrs endured beheading, hanging, death in prison and other sufferings, but did not abandon their faith.
Pope Saint John Paul II canonized them in 1988, and the Church remembers them on November 24.
Spirituality
The spirituality of the Vietnamese martyrs is a community of faith that was not extinguished by persecution. Priests and lay people, natives and missionaries, risked their lives together to keep the Church alive. Their witness, so like that of our Korean martyrs, shows that the Church in Asia was built on blood.
Reflection
Here in the United States, Vietnamese and Korean Catholics live as neighboring communities. As descendants of martyrs, would you share the heritage of faith with other Asian communities and pray together?