Emanueli Trieu Van Nguyen

Emmanuel Nguyễn Văn Triệu was a Vietnamese Catholic priest and martyr of the eighteenth century, venerated as one of the 117 Martyrs of Vietnam. He was born in 1756 in the village of Núi Yên, in the Phú Vang district of Thừa Thiên near Huế, in the southern Vietnamese realm then known as Đàng Trong. In his early adulthood he served as a soldier in a society marked by prolonged civil conflict among the Nguyễn lords, the Trịnh lords, and the Tây Sơn movement. He subsequently left military life to study for the Catholic priesthood, receiving his formation from missionaries of the Paris Foreign Missions Society, who were the principal Catholic clergy in Vietnam at that time.

After ordination as a secular (diocesan) priest he ministered to Catholic communities in the Huế region during years of growing danger. Christianity had been present in Vietnam since the seventeenth century, but the Tây Sơn rulers, especially Emperor Cảnh Thịnh, associated it with foreign influence and with political opposition to their dynasty. Anti-Christian edicts were promulgated that required believers to trample the cross and abandon the faith; clergy were particularly hunted. Father Emmanuel continued his pastoral work under these conditions until he was identified as a priest.

In 1798 he was arrested, imprisoned, and condemned for his priesthood and his refusal to apostatize. On 17 September 1798 he was beheaded at Bãi Dâu, an execution ground near Huế. He was about forty-two years old. Accounts of his passion, preserved in missionary correspondence and later Vietnamese Catholic tradition, describe him as resolute in confessing the faith until death. His martyrdom belongs to an early wave of systematic persecution that would continue, with interruptions, into the nineteenth century under later Nguyễn emperors.

The memory of Emmanuel Nguyễn Văn Triệu was kept alive by the Vietnamese Church. He was beatified by Pope Leo XIII on 27 May 1900 as one of a group of sixty-four martyrs of Annam. On 19 June 1988 Pope John Paul II canonized him together with 116 companions. The Roman Martyrology and the General Roman Calendar commemorate the Vietnamese Martyrs collectively on 24 November; Father Emmanuel is also remembered on the anniversary of his death, 17 September. Together with his companions he is invoked as a patron of Vietnam.