On this date in 1859, Paul Loc, a Catholic Vietnamese Martyr, was summarily beheaded at Saigon ahead of a French landing.

The orphaned child of a Catholic family from Cochinchina (southernmost Vietnam), Paul Loc was brought up by a pastor and went to seminary.

His ministry during the reign of a sovereign very hostile to the inroads of Christian missionaries, lasted less than two years. At that point, France went to war to conquer Cochinchina.

At that point, Father Loc was clapped in prison, but even then the earnest young man’s treatment seems to have been light. But on this date, French warships had been sighted ascending the Dong-Nai River towards Saigon itself, and the city’s panicking defenders martyred the priest almost without warning.

According to this French text, Paul Loc had his head cut off at the gates of Saigon’s citadel. Just a few days later, the French did indeed successfully take Saigon … the start of a beautiful friendship.

Pope Pius X elevated Paul Loc to “Blessed’ in 1909.

On this day..

• 1879: Anders Larsson, the first private execution in Sweden
• 1844: John Knatchbull, moral madman
• 1995: Franklin Thomas, David Thomas, and Douglas Hamlet, the last in Saint Vincent and the Grenadines
• 1818: Samuel Godfrey, American picaro
• 1945: 59 collaborationists in Bulgaria
• 1751: John Morrison, Francis McCoy, and Elizabeth Robinson, robbers
• 1864: Bizoton Affair executions
• 2009: Minurul Islam and two friends, for a dowry death
• 1892: Two Georgian bandits, witnessed by Stalin
• 1906: William Williams, the last hanged in Minnesota
• 1542: Kathryn Howard, the rose without a thorn
• 1942: Patrick Stanley Vaughan Heenan, Japanese spy