Today November 24

Hardly anything is known of St. Chrysogonus, named in the Roman Canon, except that he was a martyr at Aquileia, a Roman official and a platonic friend of St. Anastasia! That's hardly enough for a blog entry. Luckily, we have the story of St. Andrew Dung-Lac and Companions from Vietnam, a country linked to our own as Iraq will be in future history books, I predict. And who knows? Maybe the telling of our experience in Vietnam will mellow over time -- a long time. Despite appearances, we weren't "nation-building" in Vietnam (we were trying to stop the so-called "domino effect" of Communist takeover), and unlike in Iraq, we were ASKED to come in to Vietnam. Sigh.

Anyway, Andrew's story takes place long before that, in the early 1800's. Andrew was born Dung An Tran, a pagan. He and his family moved to Hanoi when he was 12, and there made the acquaintance of a catechist who shared food and shelter with them. He took lessons and was baptized Andrew. He was so clever, he learned both Chinese and Latin (in addition to his native Vietnamese), and was chosen to study that queen of sciences: theology. On March 15, 1823, he was ordained a priest -- just in time for the first of 40 years of vicious persecution of Christians. He was twice imprisoned (with his freedom bought both times by parishioners!), and later when he was arrested again (even after having moved and changed his name to Andrew Lac), he was viciously tortured and then beheaded. They don't say HOW he was tortured, but it was probably pretty bad. Folks were often put in huge long (10 feet) wooden stocks, which they dragged along. It made it physically impossible to feed themselves. Plus it was horribly painful. They were often stripped from the waist down, strapped to a board and beaten with leather thongs. They were also bound to a spit-like thing and twisted til their joints popped out, kind of a version of the rack. I bet they even used waterboarding. The Spanish and Portuguese in Southeast Asia at the time did it. Yikes. But Andrew never apostatized, nor did the other 116 martyrs: 96 Viets, 11 Spaniards, and 10 French; and of all those: 59 were laymen, 50 were priests and 8 were even bishops. The blood of the martyrs became the seed of the Church. The Faith is very strong in Vietnam even today, though it is a nominally atheist and predominately Buddhist (60% of the population) country. St. Andrew Dung-Lac, pray for us.