Andrew of Phú Yên

Life and Ministry

Andrew of Phú Yên was born about AD 1625 in the central Vietnamese province of Phú Yên, the youngest son of a widow named Joana who had been baptized by the French Jesuit Alexandre de Rhodes in the AD 1630s. Catechized as a boy by his mother and then enrolled as a teenager among the catechists trained by de Rhodes — a corps of indigenous Vietnamese lay teachers without whom the early Jesuit mission to Vietnam could not have functioned — Andrew at nineteen had become one of the principal catechists at the new community of Kẻ Chàm in Quảng Nam. He had taken a private vow of virginity, taught the catechism in the villages along the central coast, and was distinguished even among the young catechists for the seriousness of his prayer and his memory of the Scriptures.

Circumstances of Death

In the summer of AD 1644 the governor of Quảng Nam, Ông Nghè Bộ, under pressure to enforce the anti-Christian edicts of Lord Nguyễn Phúc Lan against the missions in the southern Nguyễn realm, ordered a sweep against the Kẻ Chàm catechist house. Alexandre de Rhodes himself was abroad; the catechist Ignace, whom the soldiers came to arrest, was not found. Andrew was arrested instead, although the warrant did not name him. Asked to step on a cross to renounce his faith, he refused. He was condemned by Ông Nghè Bộ on 26 July AD 1644 and led the same evening to the parade-ground outside Kẻ Chàm, where he was lanced through the chest and beheaded as the small Christian community sang the catechism aloud behind him. (The Nguyễn persecution had political dimensions related to suspicion of Portuguese and French influence; Andrew, however, was an indigenous Vietnamese lay catechist arrested in mistake for another and killed for refusing the cross-test.) Alexandre de Rhodes recovered the body the next day; the head was preserved and is venerated in Macao.

Legacy

Andrew of Phú Yên is the protomartyr of Vietnam — the first Vietnamese Christian to die for the faith of which a hundred thousand of his countrymen would die in the next three centuries. Beatified by John Paul II in AD 2000 and named patron of Vietnamese catechists, he is the founding witness of an indigenous Vietnamese church whose strength has always lain in its lay teachers. His witness is the witness of the nineteen-year-old who would not step on the cross: Christ is confessed in the language of the country by the boy of the country, and the small Christian community that sang the catechism while the lance was lifted sang for a church that has not stopped singing it since.