Augustin Nguyễn Văn Mới

Augustin Nguyễn Văn Mới, known in Latin and Western sources as Augustine Nguyen Van Moi, was a Vietnamese Roman Catholic layman and martyr of the nineteenth century. He was born in 1806 in the village of Phú Tràng in the Nam Định region of Tonkin, in northern Vietnam, then under the Nguyễn dynasty. He belonged to the rural Catholic communities of the Red River Delta, where Dominican missionaries had long been active and where village congregations and lay tertiaries formed a distinctive pattern of devotion. By occupation he was a farmer of ordinary means. He was received into the Third Order of Saint Dominic and, as a Dominican tertiary, combined agricultural labor with the prayer and penitential practices of that lay branch of the Order of Preachers. Surviving notices do not give a detailed account of his family circumstances, education, or inner life, which is typical for peasant martyrs of this period whose memory was preserved chiefly through the record of their passion.

In the 1830s Emperor Minh Mạng issued and enforced severe edicts against Christianity. The imperial court regarded the religion as a heterodox foreign teaching that threatened Confucian rites and loyalty to the throne. Christians were ordered to recant, often by trampling a crucifix, and those who refused faced arrest, torture, and death. Nguyễn Văn Mới was seized in the course of this persecution because he would not abandon the faith. He was imprisoned with other Catholics connected to the Dominican missions in Tonkin. Later hagiographical tradition presents him as remaining steadfast in prison and as refusing apostasy when pressed to deny Christianity.

On 19 December 1839 he was put to death by strangulation at the execution ground of Cổ Mễ, in the area of present-day Bắc Ninh province. He died together with companions from the same Dominican circle: the priests Thomas Đinh Viết Dụ and Dominic Nguyễn Văn Xuyên, and the lay tertiaries Thomas Nguyễn Văn Đệ, Francis Xavier Hà Trọng Mậu, and Stephen Nguyễn Văn Vinh. Their execution belongs to the intense phase of the Minh Mạng persecution in Tonkin in 1838–1840, during which bishops, priests, catechists, and ordinary villagers were killed for refusing to recant.

He is venerated as one of the 117 Martyrs of Vietnam, also known as Andrew Dung-Lac and Companions. Pope John Paul II canonized this group in Rome on 19 June 1988. Their collective liturgical memorial is kept on 24 November in the General Roman Calendar. In Vietnamese Catholic memory he is honored among the Thánh Tử đạo Việt Nam, especially in the dioceses of the former Tonkin mission, as a lay Dominican farmer who chose death rather than denial of the Christian faith.