François Jaccard

François Jaccard was a nineteenth-century French Catholic missionary priest of the Paris Foreign Missions Society and is venerated as a martyr of Vietnam. He was born in 1799 at Onnion in Savoy, a region that at the time of his birth formed part of France and is today in the department of Haute-Savoie. After priestly formation he joined the Société des Missions Étrangères de Paris, whose members are secular clergy dedicated to overseas missions rather than monks of a traditional religious order. Ordained to the priesthood, he was assigned to the mission of Tonkin in northern Vietnam and arrived there in the mid-1820s to serve under the apostolic vicariate of Western Tonkin.

In Tonkin, Jaccard worked among Vietnamese Catholic communities during a period of growing official hostility toward Christianity under the Nguyễn emperor Minh Mạng. Imperial edicts banned the faith, required the denunciation of missionaries, and imposed severe penalties on those who refused to recant. Jaccard learned the language of the country and carried out pastoral and evangelizing work, sharing the dangers faced by both foreign priests and the local clergy and laity. He was arrested more than once in the course of this ministry as the court intensified its campaign against what it regarded as a foreign religion.

In 1838 he was again seized, condemned for remaining a Christian priest and for refusing apostasy, and put to death by strangulation on 21 September 1838. He was still in his late thirties. His execution belongs to the same wave of anti-Christian violence in the late 1830s that claimed other members of the Paris Foreign Missions Society as well as many Vietnamese believers. Contemporary mission accounts remember him among the foreign clergy who would not trample the cross or abandon their flocks.

Jaccard was beatified by Pope Leo XIII on 27 May 1900 with a large group of martyrs of Tonkin, and was canonized by Pope John Paul II on 19 June 1988 as one of the one hundred and seventeen Martyrs of Vietnam. In the General Roman Calendar their collective memorial is kept on 24 November. He is commemorated among the missionary martyrs of the Paris Foreign Missions Society and with the other Vietnamese martyrs in the memory of the Church in Vietnam.