“We have received baptism, entrance into the Church, and the honor of being called Christians. Yet what good will this do us if we are Christians in name only and not in fact?”
Today we celebrate the feast of Saint Andrew Kim and the Korean Martyrs. “We have received baptism, entrance into the Church, and the honor of being called Christians. Yet what good will this do us if we are Christians in name only and not in fact?”
The first known Christian presence in Korea was a Portuguese Jesuit priest, Father Gregorius de Cespedes, who arrived in Korea in 1593 to work among Japanese expatriates, but he was not allowed work with Koreans. A decade later, however, the Korean diplomat Yi Kwangjong came back from Beijing with a world atlas and several theological books written by the Jesuit missionary to China, Matteo Ricci. Ricci’s books provoked intense academic controversy over Christian beliefs through the next two centuries.
Christianity began in Korea as an indigenous lay movement and was not imposed by a foreign ecclesiastical hierarchy. The first Catholic prayer-house was founded in 1784 in Pyongyang, now the capital of North Korea, by Yi Sung Hun, a diplomat who had been baptised in Beijing. In 1786, Yi established a hierarchy of lay-priests and although the Vatican later ruled that the appointment of lay-priests violated Canon Law, lay indigenous leadership remained quite strong. It was only when the Paris Foreign Missionary Society priests arrived around 1822 that Koreans were introduced to the sacramental life.
Kim Taegon was Korea’s first Roman Catholic priest. Born in 1821, he took the Christian name of Andrew when he was baptised at the age of 15. His parents were converts too and his father Ignatius was martyred in 1839. Kim travelled 1,500 miles to study at the seminary in Macau. After six years he managed to return to Korea through Manchuria. That same year he crossed the Yellow Sea to Shanghai and was ordained a priest. He returned to Korea and just one year after his ordination, he was arrested, tortured and at the age of 25 was finally beheaded on 22nd September 1846 at the Han River near Seoul.
There were three severe persecutions of Catholics in Korea in the years 1839, 1846 and 1866-1867. Among the 102 other martyrs, 47 women and 45 men, in those years were:
• Paul Chong Hasang aged 45, a catechist, who became a seminarian.
• Columba Kim, an unmarried woman of 26, who was imprisoned, tortured with hot tools and burning coals. She and her sister Agnes were disrobed and kept for two days in a cell with condemned criminals but were not molested; both were beheaded.
• A boy of 13, Peter Ryou, had his flesh so badly torn that he could pull off pieces and throw them at the judges; he was killed by strangulation.
• Protase Chong, a 41-year-old noble, apostasised under torture and was then set free. Later he came back, confessed his faith and was tortured to death.
• Bishop Laurence Imbert and six priests of the Paris Foreign Mission Society.
The death of these martyrs became the leaven of the Church and led to today’s splendid flowering of the Church in Korea. Even today their undying spirit sustains the Christians in the Church of silence in the north of this tragically divided land.”
Today, let’s remember Saint Andrew Kim and the Korean Martyrs, and pray for the church in the Korean peninsula as it still remains underground in the North.
Heaven is our goal.