“Come, brothers, take courage! We suffer torture for Christ, so we endure suffering patiently. We must persevere to the end, and if necessary, be ready to sacrifice our lives for the Lord.”
Saint Dominic Trần Văn Toại was born in 1812 in Đông Thành village, Thái Bình province. He married and made his living by fishing on the Nhị Bình River, near the Bà Lạt estuary.
Under the edict banning Christianity of King Tự Đức, on January 17, 1860, ông Toại and ông Dũng were arrested and taken to Quỳnh Côi district. Seeing that ông Toại was sick and had difficulty walking, the soldiers proposed that if he paid a sum of money he would be released. Wishing to set a shining example for his children to live the faith and not wanting to lose the opportunity to bear witness for the Lord, he firmly refused this proposal. He asked the mandarin for permission to go by cart to the district to present himself, so that he could share the same fate as the faithful of his parish.
Throughout the nine months of imprisonment, during many occasions of being brought to the courthouse, tortured, and forced to trample on the Holy Cross, the two men, Toại and Dũng, still steadfastly professed their faith in the Christian religion. Ông Toại lived quietly in prayer and encouraged his fellow prisoners who were co-religionists. The judges, seeing that they could not shake the two men, proposed the sentence of death by burning.
On June 5, 1862, the two witnesses of the faith were brought to the pyre erected right at the execution ground in Nam Định. The two stepped into the bamboo cage and were burned alive.
Saint Ðaminh Trần Văn Toại was beatified on April 29, 1951, and was canonized on June 19, 1988.
The content about the saint in this post is summarized and paraphrased from the book “Hạnh Các Thánh Tử Đạo Việt Nam” - Lives of the Vietnamese Martyrs (Vietnamese Bishops’ Conference, edited by Bishop Peter Nguyễn Văn Khảm, Tôn Giáo Publishing House, 2018). This post is not a verbatim copy but a re‑presentation based on the original source.