"I have told you that I am a Christian, and will be one until my death." — Paul Chong Hasang, to the judge who condemned him
The Church That Had No Priests
Imagine a Church that existed for years before any of its members had seen a priest.
Its people had never attended Mass. They had never been to confession or watched a sacrament celebrated. What they had was a small pile of books, smuggled in from China, and a few educated men who read them and could not stop thinking about what they said. From those books they built a community, taught each other, baptized each other in the emergency form the Church allows to laypeople, and waited for someone to come from across the border.
That Church was Korea's. When its first priest finally arrived, he found thousands of believers who had learned the faith entirely on their own. Pope John Paul II later said that the Korean Church is unique because it was founded entirely by lay people, and he meant it as the highest praise.
These are the Korean Martyrs: one hundred and three saints, ten of them foreign missionaries and ninety-three of them Koreans, including forty-seven women. They range in age from thirteen to seventy-eight. Two of them stand at the head of the list. Andrew Kim Taegon was the first Korean to become a priest, and he died at twenty-five. Paul Chong Hasang was a married layman who spent his life pleading for priests, and he did not live to see one ordained.
They are for everyone who has ever been told that faith needs an institution before it can begin. They are also for everyone who has to hold on to that faith when the institution is gone.
A Kingdom With Its Doors Shut
Late eighteenth-century Korea was the Joseon kingdom, and it had chosen isolation. Foreign ships were turned away. Foreign travelers were not admitted. The only regular contact with the outside world was a yearly diplomatic caravan that walked to Beijing to pay tribute to the Chinese court, and that road would matter a great deal to this story.
The kingdom was held together by Confucian order. Every relationship had its place: king and subject, father and son, husband and wife, elder and younger. Society was divided into a small class of scholars and nobles, a much larger group of commoners who paid taxes and labored, and beneath them the enslaved. Honoring one's ancestors through rites at the family altar was not a hobby. It was the center of family life and a pillar of the state.
The Catholic faith reached this world in a way no one had planned. Scholars in Seoul got hold of Christian books written in Chinese and began to study them. In 1784, a young man named Yi Seung-hun traveled to Beijing, was baptized there, and came home to baptize others. Korean Catholicism dates its beginning from that year, and the Church in Korea counted 1984 as its two-hundredth anniversary.
What drew people was not mainly doctrine. It was the way Christians treated one another. They called themselves friends, a word that in a Confucian society implied equality, and they gathered nobles and commoners, men and women, in a single room. A regime built on hierarchy heard that as a threat.
Books First, Then Blood
The early community made an honest mistake. In their eagerness to have the sacraments, some of the first leaders appointed men among themselves to act as priests. When word came back from the bishop of Beijing that this was not possible, they stopped at once. The sincerity of that correction says something about them. They wanted the real thing, and they would not settle for a substitute.
They sent messengers across the border to beg for a priest. In 1791 a further question arrived from Beijing: the bishop there ruled that Catholics could not take part in the ancestral rites, which the Church at that time understood as tied to idolatry. Two young men, Paul Yun Ji-chung and his cousin, took the ruling seriously. They burned their family's ancestor tablets. When Yun's mother died, he gave her a Christian funeral. The government treated this as an attack on the foundations of the kingdom, and in December 1791 both men were beheaded. They were Korea's first martyrs. (The Church has since beatified them, along with 122 others, in 2014.)
Three years later, a Chinese priest, James Zhou Wenmo, was smuggled across the border. He found four thousand Catholics who had never met a priest, and within six years there were ten thousand. Then came the persecution of 1801. Zhou gave himself up to spare his flock and was beheaded that May. The Church was without a priest again, and this time the wait would last thirty-five years.
Among those who died in 1801 was a scholar named Augustine Chong Yak-jong, one of the first great lay theologians of Korea, who had written a catechism in the Korean alphabet so ordinary people could read it. He was beheaded outside the small west gate of Seoul. Tradition holds that he chose to die looking up at the sky. His eldest son died with him. Another son, seven years old at the time, was left alive.
That boy was Paul.
The Seven-Year-Old at the Execution Ground
After the executions, the family was scattered. Paul's mother, Cecilia, took her surviving children and retreated to the countryside. Their family name was marked, and the father and brother they loved were dead for the crime of being Christians.
Paul grew up in that shadow. He did not become bitter, and he did not become silent. As a young man he took work as a servant to an official interpreter of the Korean government. It was a modest position, but it came with a passport: the interpreter traveled to Beijing with the yearly caravan, and his servant went with him.
The Church needed exactly that. Someone had to get to Beijing, find the bishop, and ask again for priests. Paul made the trip nine times.
Nine Journeys Across the Ice
The trip was about 750 miles, mostly on foot, across a mountainous frontier and a river that froze hard enough in winter to cross. Any Korean discovered carrying Catholic messages would have faced execution. Paul traveled with his fellow envoys, notably Augustine Yu Chin-gil and Charles Cho Shin-chol, and they did the same thing on each journey: they went to the bishop of Beijing, begged him to send priests, and came back to a Church that was still waiting.
When Beijing could not help, Paul went further. In 1825, he and the other lay leaders wrote to the pope in Rome, asking him directly to give Korea its own missionaries and bishops. This was an extraordinary step. A handful of laypeople in a closed kingdom were addressing the Bishop of Rome as if he were a neighbor who could be asked for help. In 1831, Pope Gregory XVI created the Vicariate of Korea. Its first bishop died on the road, in northern China, before he ever reached Korean soil. Then the Paris Foreign Missions Society sent Father Pierre Maubant, who slipped into the kingdom in 1836. Father Jacques Chastan followed later that year, and Bishop Laurent Imbert, the second vicar apostolic, arrived in December 1837.
Paul and the other envoys were the ones who got them in. They planned the crossing, arranged the hiding places in Seoul, and kept the missionaries fed and safe. As the Apostle Paul says in his Letter to the Romans, "How are they to hear without someone to preach?" Paul Chong spent his adult life making sure someone could.
Imbert saw Paul's gifts and began to train him in Latin and theology, intending to ordain him. It was a good plan. The persecution came first.
A Nobleman's Son on the Road to Macau
Andrew Kim Taegon was born on August 21, 1821, in Solmoe, in the province of Chungcheong. He belonged to a noble family, and to a family of martyrs. His great-grandfather had died in prison in 1814 after ten years of confinement for the faith. Other relatives had been executed. His father, Ignatius Kim Je-jun, was a catechist who kept the family faith alive while living in constant danger.
When Father Maubant reached Korea in 1836, he baptized the young Andrew, then about fifteen. He also noticed something: the boy was quick, serious, and devout. Maubant selected Andrew and two other teenagers to be trained as priests abroad. There was no seminary in Korea, and there could not be. The boys would have to go to the Paris Foreign Missions Society's college in Macau, on the far south coast of China.
They walked. The trip covered roughly thirteen hundred miles, through a country whose language they did not speak, on a route where being caught meant being sent back to Korea to be killed. One of the three boys died of illness in Macau. Andrew stayed six years, studying Latin, French, and theology.
He did not know, as he studied, that the world he was preparing to return to was about to be torn apart.
The Year the Priests Walked Into Prison
In April 1839, the government issued an edict against the Catholic faith, and the persecution known in Korea as the Gihae persecution began. Arrests spread through Seoul and the surrounding countryside. Christians were seized in their homes. Some were betrayed by neighbors, and some by fellow believers who broke under pressure.
Bishop Imbert went into hiding in June. He was betrayed by a Catholic who had abandoned the faith and was arrested on August 11. From prison he made a decision that has been debated ever since. He sent a message to Father Maubant and Father Chastan, the only other priests in the country, telling them to give themselves up. The government had made clear that it wanted the foreigners, and Imbert believed that if the priests surrendered, the persecution against the ordinary Christians might ease.
The two young priests obeyed. All three were tried, tortured, and sentenced. On September 21, 1839, they were beheaded at Saenamteo, on a sandy bank of the Han River near Seoul. Their heads were displayed in public to frighten the Christians.
The persecution did not stop. It got worse.
The Letter to the Prime Minister
Paul Chong Hasang was arrested during the summer. He knew what would happen. But he also knew that the government's case against Christians rested on lies: that the faith was disloyal, that it destroyed family life, that it was a foreign plot. From prison, he wrote a formal defense addressed to the prime minister of the kingdom.
It was a remarkable document. Paul did not attack the government or plead for mercy. He explained calmly what Catholics believed, and why the faith taught loyalty to the king and honor to parents. He argued that the faith was not a threat to the values Korea prized but their fulfilment. In writing, he was doing what the First Letter of Peter asks of every Christian: giving an account of the hope that is in you, with gentleness and respect.
The judge read it. According to the account that has come down, he told Paul that he was right in what he had written, but that the king forbade this religion, and it was Paul's duty to renounce it. Paul answered that he had said he was a Christian and would remain one until death.
The judge had him tortured. Through all of it, those present said, his face remained calm.
September 22, 1839
Paul Chong Hasang died on September 22, 1839, one day after the three priests. He was forty-five. The old accounts disagree on the exact manner of his execution. Some describe him being bound to a cross on a cart and driven through the streets to the place of execution, and the Church's lists place his death outside the small west gate of Seoul. What all of them agree on is that he did not recant. Augustine Yu Chin-gil, his fellow envoy on the road to Beijing, died the same day.
The rest of his family followed him. His mother, Cecilia Yu So-sa, died in prison in November, aged seventy-eight. His sister Elizabeth was beheaded in December. The family that had lost a husband, a father, and a brother in 1801 gave up its last members thirty-eight years later.
Paul had been the Korean Church's voice to Rome and to Beijing. He never received priestly ordination. Yet the priests who died beside him would not have reached Korea without him.
The Long Road Home
Andrew learned in Macau that the priests he was supposed to join were dead. In time he learned that his own father, Ignatius Kim, had been beheaded on September 26, 1839, five days after the priests, outside the small west gate. Andrew was eighteen years old. News like that ends some vocations and forges others.
He kept going.
In 1842, having completed his studies, he set out for home. The land border was watched, and his first two attempts to get through failed. On the third try, in 1845, he slipped into Korea through Manchuria. He reached Seoul, met with the surviving Christians, and then did something bold. He left again, this time by sea. He sailed across the Yellow Sea to Shanghai in a small wooden boat, a voyage across open water in a vessel never meant for it. There, in August 1845, he was ordained a priest by Bishop Jean Ferréol, the vicar apostolic. He was the first Korean ever to receive holy orders.
He came back to Korea by sea, with Bishop Ferréol and a young French priest named Antoine Daveluy. He was twenty-four.
Thirteen Months
Andrew had thirteen months as a priest in Korea. He spent them working.
The persecution had left the Christian community scattered and afraid, and Mass had to be celebrated in secret at night in the homes of the faithful. Andrew's greatest task, however, was to open a route by which more missionaries could come. The land border was too closely watched, so he turned to the sea. He traveled the coast and the islands off the western shore, looking for a way for foreign ships to reach Korea unseen.
It was on this work, in June 1846, that he was arrested. He was imprisoned, questioned, and tortured. From his cell he wrote letters to the Christians he had left behind. In one of them, he told them that the Church was built through the suffering of its faithful, that persecution was not outside God's care, and that he and the twenty others in prison with him were still well. He asked them not to forget the families of any who were killed. He ended, "I leave you my kiss of love."
The Riverbank at Saenamteo
On September 16, 1846, Andrew Kim Taegon was led to the same sandy bank by the Han River where the three priests had died seven years earlier. He was twenty-five. He was beheaded by the sword.
According to the record, he spoke to the crowd before he died, telling them that if he had had dealings with foreigners it was for his religion and his God, and that it was for God that he died. He said that his immortal life was about to begin. He urged those watching to become Christians, if they wanted to be happy after death.
His body was left exposed for three days, as the law required, and then buried on the site. After forty days, Korean Catholics recovered his remains and carried them to a mountain about thirty-five miles away. When Bishop Ferréol died in 1853, worn out by his labors, he asked to be buried beside his young priest. He said he had loved Andrew as a father loves a son.
The Ordinary Ones
Andrew and Paul were the leaders, but most of the martyrs were ordinary people. Ninety-two of the hundred and three were laypeople: farmers, a boatman, soldiers, a merchant who made straw sandals, a maker of musical instruments, a county governor, and a large number of widows, wives, and unmarried women. Most were beheaded. Others were hanged, strangled, or died in prison of hunger, disease, and torture.
They were not a group of perfect heroes, and the Church does not present them that way.
Protasius Chong Kuk-bo, a nobleman, gave in under torture. He denied the faith and was released. Afterwards, tormented by what he had done, he went back to the authorities and declared himself a Christian again. He died of the injuries he received. The Church honors him as a martyr, and the story of his fall and return may be the most consoling in the whole group.
Peter Yu Tae-chol was thirteen. He walked into a magistrate's office and said he was a Christian. The judges had him tortured so brutally that even they were shaken, and fearing that public opinion would turn, they had him strangled in prison.
Agatha Yi was seventeen. She and her brother were told falsely that their parents had renounced the faith. She replied that whatever her parents had done was their affair, but that she could not betray the Lord of heaven whom she had always served.
Columba Kim Hyo-im and her sister Agnes were unmarried women who lived together in service of the sick and poor, a form of consecrated life that did not yet exist in Korea. Columba was tortured with red-hot awls and burning coals. The sisters were stripped and kept for two days in a cell with condemned criminals, apparently as a humiliation, but were not harmed. When Columba protested, the practice was dropped for the women who followed. Agnes was beheaded on September 3, and Columba on September 26.
Anna Pak Agi had never really understood the finer points of doctrine. What she had was an unshakable devotion to Jesus and Mary. She died on May 24, 1839, and the Church counts her among its saints.
John Nam Chong-sam was a regional governor, a man who had risen high in a society that prized rank. He resigned his post because he could not in conscience take part in the sacrifices to ancestors that his office required. He was known for justice, chastity, and poverty. He was beheaded in 1866.
Cecilia Yu So-sa, Paul's mother, was seventy-eight and died in prison.
These are the faces of the Church that the priests came to find.
1866: The Last Great Storm
After 1846 the missionaries who remained kept working in secret, and the Church grew despite everything. Then, in the winter of 1866, a new persecution broke out, the fiercest of the century. Thousands of Christians were killed.
The French bishops and priests were among the first targets. Bishop Simeon Berneux, the head of the mission, was arrested with three young priests and beheaded on March 7. Bishop Antoine Daveluy, who had come to Korea with Andrew in 1845, had become the new head of the mission only weeks before. When the arrests spread, he turned himself in, hoping to spare his people, and wrote to two of his priests to do the same. All were beheaded on March 30, at a place called Galmaemot. Daveluy had spent years printing catechisms, compiling a Korean-French dictionary, and gathering records of the earlier martyrs. Much of what we know about the Church's early history comes from his notes.
Twenty-four of the martyrs of 1866 and 1867 were among the group beatified by Pope Paul VI in 1968.
Seed of a Church
Christians in Korea were finally granted religious freedom in the 1880s, some forty years after Andrew's death. Today Catholics number in the millions, and the country that once punished them with death sends missionaries all over the world.
The 79 martyrs of 1839 to 1846 were beatified by Pope Pius XI in 1925, and the 24 of 1866 to 1867 by Pope Paul VI in 1968. On May 6, 1984, during the bicentennial of the Korean Church, Pope John Paul II canonized all 103 together. He did it in Seoul, not Rome, the first time in history that a canonization took place outside the Vatican. He said that the death of the martyrs was similar to the death of Christ on the cross, because like his, it had become the beginning of new life. He also prayed for the Christians of the North, that the martyrs' undying spirit might sustain the Church there.
The feast of all 103 is celebrated on September 20. In 2014, another 124 Korean martyrs, led by Paul Yun Ji-chung, were beatified by Pope Francis in Seoul.
Why Andrew Kim is patron of Korean clergy. In 1949 the Holy See named him principal patron of the clergy of Korea. He was the first Korean priest, he risked everything to return home, and he died twenty-five years old, thirteen months after his ordination. Every Korean priest since has followed where he went first.
Why Paul Chong is honored as a model of lay apostles. This is a devotion by tradition rather than a formal decree, and it fits the life. He was a married layman who never became a priest. He used the ordinary circumstances of his life, a servant's job, a yearly trip to Beijing, a family name marked by martyrdom, to build the connection that brought priests to Korea. He also wrote the first defense of the Catholic faith addressed to the Korean government. The Church in Korea remembers him as proof that a layperson can change the destiny of a nation.
Why the martyrs are invoked for the Church in Korea. They were its founders. The faith in Korea was planted by laypeople, watered by the blood of a hundred and three saints, and by thousands of others whose names are known only to God. The seed of the Church, as the old saying goes, is the blood of the martyrs. In Korea, the saying has been proved true.
| Saints | Andrew Kim Tae-gon, Paul Chong Ha-sang and Companions |
| Born | Andrew Kim – August 21, 1821, Solmoe, Chungcheong Province |
| Paul Chong – c. 1794-95, Korea | |
| Died | Andrew Kim – September 16, 1846, Saenamteo near Seoul (beheaded) |
| Paul Chong – September 22, 1839, Seoul (executed for refusing to renounce the faith) | |
| Companions – 1839 to 1867, executed, strangled or died in prison | |
| Feast Day | September 20 – Memorial in the General Roman Calendar |
| Order / Vocation | Andrew Kim – Priest |
| Paul Chong – Married lay catechist and seminarian | |
| The 103 together – 3 bishops, 8 priests (including Andrew Kim), 92 laypeople (47 women, 45 men) | |
| Canonized | May 6, 1984 – Pope John Paul II (Seoul) |
| Beatified | July 5, 1925 – Pope Pius XI (79 martyrs) |
| October 6, 1968 – Pope Paul VI (24 martyrs) | |
| Body / Relics | Andrew Kim was reburied about 35 miles from Seoul on Mount Miriae forty days after his death |
| Bishop Imbert, Fr. Maubant and Fr. Chastan are enshrined at Samseong-san near Seoul | |
| Relics of the martyrs are venerated across Korea | |
| Patron of | Korean clergy (Andrew Kim, 1949) |
| Korean lay apostles (Paul Chong) | |
| The Church in Korea | |
| Known as | The Korean Martyrs |
| Andrew Kim Taegon and Companions | |
| Paul Chong Hasang and Companions | |
| Key writings | Paul Chong Hasang’s letter to the prime minister defending the Catholic faith |
| Andrew Kim’s letters from prison | |
| Foundations | The lay-founded Church of Korea |
| The mission route by sea opened by Andrew Kim | |
| Their words | “My immortal life is on the point of beginning.” – Andrew Kim before execution |
A Prayer to the Korean Martyrs
O God, who gave to the Church in Korea a great host of martyrs, and made the faith of laypeople, priests, and bishops the seed of a new people: grant that we, like Andrew and Paul, may love you above every earthly bond, and remain faithful when faith costs us dearly. Through the prayers of your holy martyrs, strengthen those who suffer for their faith today, watch over the Church in Korea, and bring peace and reunion to all its people. Through Christ our Lord. Amen.
Sources for Further Reading
- Homily of Pope John Paul II at the canonization of the 103 Korean Martyrs, Seoul, May 6, 1984 (Holy See).
- "Korea, Martyrs of, Ss.," New Catholic Encyclopedia.
- Catholic Bishops' Conference of Korea, The Lives of the 103 Korean Martyr Saints (series).
- Charles Dallet, Histoire de l'Église de Corée (Paris, 1874).
- Leonard Foley, O.F.M., Saint of the Day (Franciscan Media), entry for September 20.
- Roman Martyrology and the Proper of Saints for September 20.
- Catechism of the Catholic Church, nos. 2473–2474, on martyrdom; Lumen Gentium, no. 42.
