Pere Almató

Pere Almató i Ribera, known in Spanish as Pedro Almato, was born on 1 November 1830 in Sant Feliu Sasserra, in the Bages district of Catalonia, Spain. He grew up in a rural Catholic setting typical of inland Catalonia in the first half of the nineteenth century. As a young man he entered the Order of Preachers (Dominicans), received formation in the Order, and was ordained a priest. Like many Spanish Dominicans of that generation, he volunteered for the East Asian missions, which the Order had long supplied from the Iberian peninsula through its houses in the Philippines and its vicariates in Tonkin.

From the Dominican mission network in the Philippines he was sent on to northern Vietnam, then under the Nguyễn emperor Tự Đức. There he served as a missionary priest in the Apostolic Vicariate of Eastern Tonkin, a jurisdiction entrusted to the Dominicans and home to a substantial Vietnamese Catholic community. In the late 1850s the imperial court intensified edicts against Christianity, treating the faith as a political and cultural threat bound up with French and Spanish pressure. Bishops, European missionaries, Vietnamese clergy, and lay Catholics were arrested, tortured, and frequently put to death. Almató exercised his ministry in that climate of persecution.

In 1861 he was seized together with two Dominican bishops: Jerónimo Hermosilla, vicar apostolic of Eastern Tonkin, and Valentín Berrio-Ochoa, the coadjutor. The three were imprisoned at Hải Dương and condemned under the anti-Christian laws. On 1 November 1861, the same calendar date as Almató’s birth thirty-one years earlier, they were beheaded. Their execution belongs to the large series of martyrdoms in Tonkin and Annam in the mid-nineteenth century that later formed the historical core of the group known as the Vietnamese Martyrs.

Pope Pius X beatified Pere Almató on 20 May 1906 with other martyrs of Vietnam. On 19 June 1988 Pope John Paul II canonized him among the one hundred and seventeen Martyrs of Vietnam, commemorated as Saint Andrew Dũng-Lạc and Companions. Their feast is kept on 24 November in the General Roman Calendar. Almató is remembered in the Dominican Order, in Catalonia—especially at Sant Feliu Sasserra—and in the Vietnamese Catholic Church as a missionary priest who died for the faith.