Peter Vũ Văn Truật

Peter Vũ Văn Truật (Vietnamese: Phêrô Vũ Văn Truật) was a nineteenth-century Vietnamese Catholic lay catechist and martyr. Traditional hagiographical accounts place his birth in 1816 in the village of Kẻ Sở, Thanh Oai district, Hà Đông province, in Tonkin under the Nguyễn dynasty (in what is now northern Vietnam). He was raised in a Catholic family during a period when the Church in Vietnam endured recurring official hostility and restrictive edicts against Christianity.

As a young man he served as a thầy giảng, or catechist, assisting priests in instructing the faithful, preparing catechumens, and supporting Christian communities that often had to live their faith discreetly. His work was associated with the missionary structures of western Tonkin, where the Paris Foreign Missions Society was active. During the reign of Emperor Minh Mạng, Christianity was treated as a foreign threat to Confucian order and royal authority, and edicts of persecution intensified in the 1830s.

In 1838 Truật was arrested together with the priest Paul Nguyễn Ngân and the fellow catechist Peter Trương Văn Đường. They were taken to Sơn Tây. Interrogated and pressed to apostatize by trampling a crucifix, he refused. On 18 December 1838 he was executed by beheading at Sơn Tây, at about twenty-two years of age. Surviving sources say little about his family circumstances and concentrate on his steadfastness in prison and at the place of execution.

Local Catholic memory preserved the witness of Truật and his companions. He was beatified by Pope Leo XIII in 1900 among a large group of martyrs of Annam and Tonkin, and was canonized by Pope John Paul II on 19 June 1988 as one of the 117 Martyrs of Vietnam. The group is commemorated on 24 November. His life is cited as an example of lay fidelity during the great nineteenth-century persecutions in Vietnam.