Paulo Nguyen Van My

Paulo Nguyễn Văn Mỹ (also known as Paul Nguyễn Văn Mỹ or Phaolô Nguyễn Văn Mỹ) was a Vietnamese Roman Catholic lay catechist and martyr of the nineteenth century, later numbered among the 117 Martyrs of Vietnam. He was born in 1798 in the village of Kẻ Sai in Nam Định province, in the Red River Delta of northern Vietnam, then under the Nguyễn dynasty. Catholicism had been present in Vietnam since the seventeenth century, but priests were few and often forced into hiding. Trained lay catechists (thầy giảng) therefore carried much of the Church’s pastoral work: they instructed catechumens, supported Christian families, and led local communities in prayer. Nguyễn Văn Mỹ belonged to this class of native teachers of the faith in Tonkin.

Emperor Minh Mạng (r. 1820–1841) regarded Christianity as a heterodox foreign teaching and a political danger. His edicts ordered the destruction of churches, the pursuit of missionaries and native clergy, and the forced recantation of Vietnamese Christians, commonly by requiring them to trample a crucifix. Enforcement grew harsher in the 1830s. In 1838 Paulo Nguyễn Văn Mỹ was arrested together with two fellow catechists, Peter Trương Văn Đường and Peter Vũ Văn Truật. The three men were taken to Sơn Tây, a fortified administrative centre west of Hanoi, imprisoned, and pressed to apostatize. Traditional accounts, drawn from missionary correspondence and local Christian memory, hold that they refused to deny the faith.

On 18 December 1838 the three catechists were executed by strangulation at Sơn Tây. Strangulation was one of the forms of capital punishment used in Nguyễn Vietnam. Their deaths formed part of a wider cluster of executions in Tonkin in 1838–1840 that also claimed European priests of the Paris Foreign Missions Society and numerous Vietnamese clergy and laity. Reports of these martyrdoms reached Europe and later supplied material for the ecclesiastical inquiries that examined the Vietnamese martyrs.

Paulo Nguyễn Văn Mỹ was canonized in Rome on 19 June 1988 by Pope John Paul II, together with 116 other martyrs of Vietnam spanning the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries—bishops, priests, religious, catechists, and lay people. The group is commemorated jointly on 24 November. Apart from the outline of his birth at Kẻ Sai, his work as a catechist, his arrest with two companions, and his death by strangulation at Sơn Tây, few personal particulars—family life, education, or the exact places of his ministry—are preserved in sources available to historians. He is known chiefly as a lay teacher of the faith who accepted death rather than apostasy during the Minh Mạng persecutions.