Augustin Schoeffler

Augustin Schoeffler was born on 22 November 1822 in Mittelbronn, in the Moselle region of northeastern France. He received formation for the priesthood at the diocesan seminary of Nancy. Drawn to missionary work, he entered the Paris Foreign Missions Society (Société des Missions Étrangères de Paris), a society of secular priests devoted to evangelization in Asia. He was ordained a priest in 1847 and was sent to Tonkin in northern Vietnam, then under the Nguyễn dynasty.

Nineteenth-century Vietnam saw repeated imperial edicts against Christianity. Foreign missionaries and Vietnamese Catholics lived under the threat of arrest, torture, and execution. Schoeffler served in that setting, exercising priestly ministry among local Christian communities, learning the language, and sharing the hardships of a Church under pressure. His work belonged to the longer effort of the Paris Foreign Missions Society to sustain Catholic life in East Asia.

In 1851 he was seized by the authorities during a campaign against Christians. Condemned for his faith and his priestly office, he was beheaded on 1 May 1851 at Sơn Tây. He was twenty-eight years old. His death forms part of the history of the Vietnamese martyrs, a group that included bishops, priests, and a far greater number of Vietnamese clergy and laity as well as other European missionaries.

Pope Leo XIII beatified him in 1900. On 19 June 1988 Pope John Paul II canonized him together with 116 other martyrs of Vietnam. In the Catholic Church he is commemorated on 1 May, the anniversary of his death, and also on 24 November, the feast of the Vietnamese Martyrs.