19th century
Feast: February 2
He wrote his last letter to his father from a bamboo cage, signing off with: 'I go happily and with a light heart.'
Theophane Venard knew exactly what he was getting into. As a boy in France, he read about the martyrdom of Jean-Charles Cornay in Vietnam and told his sister he wanted to go there. He joined the Paris Foreign Missions Society and arrived in Tonkin (northern Vietnam) in 1854, during a persecution so fierce that priests lived in hiding, celebrated Mass in attics, and moved between safe houses at night. Theophane ministered in secret for six years — learning Vietnamese, training catechists, and living in constant danger. He was cheerful about it. His letters home are astonishingly light-hearted for a man who knew he would likely be killed. When he was finally betrayed and captured in 1860, he was kept in a bamboo cage for months. He wrote to his father: 'A slight sabre-cut will separate my head from my body, like a spring flower which the Master of the garden picks for His pleasure. We are all flowers planted on this earth, which God plucks in His own good time.' He was beheaded on February 2, 1861, at thirty-one. St. Therese of Lisieux later carried his portrait and called him her favorite martyr — his simplicity and joy in the face of death matched her own spirituality exactly.