St. Théophane Vénard

Who they were

Théophane Vénard was a French schoolmaster's son who read a martyr's story as a boy and told his family, with terrible accuracy, that he meant to follow it. A priest of the Paris Foreign Missions, he served the hidden Church of Tonkin through the fiercest years of persecution until his capture in 1860.

Then, chained in a small bamboo cage awaiting execution, he wrote the letters that made him immortal: pages to his father, his sister and his brothers, of such serene and almost playful joy, comparing himself to a spring flower the Master of the garden gathers in the morning, that they circulated through France as a phenomenon. Their most consequential reader came later. St. Thérèse of Lisieux copied his letters, kept his picture in her breviary, called him the brother of her soul, and asked for his portrait on her own deathbed. He was beheaded on 2 February 1861 at thirty one, and canonized in 1988 with St. Andrew Dũng-Lạc and companions, on whose feast he is kept, since his own death date falls on the Presentation.

Why people turn to St. Théophane Vénard

Anyone under a sentence, medical or legal or of circumstance, who wants a joy that is not denial, because the cage letters are exactly that and nothing less. Young people discerning missions. And everyone who writes to the suffering.

How to ask their intercession

Write the letter. To the hospice bed, the cell, the deployed. Then offer it. His whole legacy is what a page of ordinary joy can carry into a cage.