The Family Foundation School Catholic Community Bulletin
Pauca Verba (a few words)
Under the altar cloth of the retreat house chapel there is a beautiful cloth containing the relics (little pieces of cloth or bone) of saints. One of the relics is of The Holy Martyrs of Vietnam: perhaps a piece of bone taken from a common grave. The best known of these Martyrs of Vietnam is St. Theophane Venard, (1829-1861. Read his remarkable life here and realize you and the holy martyr have the Catholic-Christian faith in common.
His father, Jean Venard, was a village schoolmaster in France. He and his wife, Marie Guevet, had six children, of whom the four eldest, christened Melanie, Theophane, Henri, and Eusebe, survived infanthood. She died giving birth to the last, when Theophane was thirteen. He was then away at school from where he progressed in 1847 to the minor seminary and then to the major seminary the following year. It was here that his thoughts turned to a missionary vocation, as he confided in a letter to his sister Melanie, but asking her to keep it a secret, as he was not yet a sub-deacon, (one of the later steps towards ordination as a priest) a condition for entry into the seminary for Foreign Missions. He entered this in March1851 and was ordained priest in June 1852 at age 23.
With four companions he left Paris on 19 September 1852; they took ship from Antwerp and sailed to Hong Long. He had originally been assigned to a mission in China, but for various reasons was diverted to western Tonkin in Vietnam, which he reached in July 1854. He found the region undergoing a fresh wave of persecution, with forty-nine Christians put to death since 1837. But there was still a strong and well-organized missionary presence, grouped mainly under the Institute known as La Maison Dieu, which ran schools and hospitals.
He learned the language from two native catechists (teachers of religion) assigned to him as helpers but was prevented from carrying out an effective ministry for two and a half years owing to a succession of illness – asthma, typhoid, and tuberculosis – from which he was cured by a ferocious administration of blistering jars (candles set in jars and applied to various pressure-points of the body, on much the same principle as acupuncture). He then spent a period of convalescence at Ke-Vinh, brought to an end when two mandarins ordered the destruction of the Maison Dieu college there. Warned in time, he fled by boat toward Hoang-Nguyen, where his friend Father Theurel was acting head of the school. In 1857 Father Theurel was appointed pro-vicar and Theophane district head of missions. He spent the next year working to spread the gospel further among the 300,000 population of his district, of whom some 12,000 were already Christian. Then on June 10, 1858 Hoang-Nguyen was also destroyed. Again the alarm had been raised in time; the missionaries fled into a clandestine existence, often having to hide in pits infested with spiders, toads and rats. From one of these, he wrote cheerfully enough to a priest friend: “One has to be ever watchful. If the dog barks, or any other stranger passes, the door is instantly closed, and I prepare to hide myself in a still lower hole…This is how I have lived for three months…What do you think of our position? Three missionaries, one of whom is a bishop, lying side by side, day and night, in a space of about one and a half yards square, our only light and means of breathing being three holes, the size of a little finger, made in the mud wall…” Yet he made light of his physical sufferings; for him, the worst part was that he was unable to bring consolation or the sacraments to his scattered flock. Under such conditions he managed to translate the New Testament into Vietnamese.
He was betrayed to the authorities, arrested on November 30, 1860 (age 31), put in a wooden cage, and taken to Hanoi to be interrogated. There he was repeatedly ordered to trample on a cross. He refused and after two month of delay was beheaded, on February 2, 1861. Between his arrest and his execution, kept continually in his cage, he was able to write eleven letters to his family. In one, dated January 2 1861, he described the impression he made on the crowds who came to stare at him: “What a lovely fellow that Westerner is! He’s as happy and cheerful as someone going to a feast! He doesn’t seem at all afraid. That one hasn’t sinned! He only came to Annam to do good, and yet he’s being put to death…”
In fact everyone, from mandarin to peasant, seems to have treated him kindly and with respect, expressing regret that the law of the kingdom was forcing them to do what they were. “I have not had to endure tortures as so many of my brethren have. One light blow from a saber will separate my head from my body like a spring flower which the Master of a garden picks for his pleasure. We are all flowers planted on this earth, which God picks in his time, some earlier, some later.” To his brother Eusebe he wrote less than two weeks before his death: “I have loved and still love this Annamite people with a burning love. If God had given me long years, I believe I would have devoted myself completely, body and soul, to building up the Church of Tonkin.”
Theophane’s body was transferred to the church of the Foreign Mission Society in Paris, but without his severed head, which remains in Tonkin. He was beatified in 1909 with nineteen other martyrs from Tonkin and canonized in 1988.
*****
1) From prison, the saint himself asks, “What do you make of our position?” Dare we answer?
2) Let’s not excuse ourselves from this kind of endurance for the gospel of Christ saying, Oh, I could never do that! Reflect! Think about these things!
3) Theophane held no animosity towards those who held him captive, betrayed him, abused him, even murdered him. How might I even begin to love this way here, in this place, where we are so easily and quickly irritated and angered?
4) He could have escaped it all simply by stepping on a cross. But he wouldn’t! Holy Theophane Venard, help us to be strong for the things that really matter!
