The Korean Catholic Church: beginnings and persecution

A faith that came in books

From the seventeenth century Korean envoys brought home from Beijing books that Western missionaries had written in Chinese, among them the Jesuit Matteo Ricci's The True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven of 1603, whose writing is told in Catholic reform and world mission. Scholars first read such books as Western learning. Catholic tradition holds that in the winter of 1779 young scholars gathered at the hermitage of Cheonjinam and the temple of Jueosa to study them, though historians disagree about what that gathering studied.

One of them, Yi Byeok, came to believe, and in the winter of 1783 he urged Yi Seung-hun (1756–1801), who was going to Beijing with his father, to be baptized there. Early in 1784 Yi Seung-hun was baptized by Father de Grammont at the North Church in Beijing, and it is told that he was given the name Peter, to be a rock for the church. Back in Seoul that year he baptized Yi Byeok, Gwon Il-sin and others, and the Korean Catholic Church counts that year as its beginning. It was a church founded by lay people, before any missionary came.

In 1785 believers meeting at the house of the interpreter Kim Beom-u in Myeongnye-bang, today's Myeong-dong, were discovered, and Kim died in exile. Having no priest, the believers chose priests from among themselves to say Mass; learning that this was against the church's law, they stopped and asked the bishop in Beijing for a priest. Bishop de Gouvea's reply of 1790 also forbade the ancestral rites.

The Sinhae and Sinyu persecutions, and the silk letter

To Confucians the ancestral rite carried filial piety beyond death, serving departed parents as if they were living, a duty of not forgetting where one came from; the spirit tablet was the ancestor's seat of honour. In 1791 Yun Ji-chung (Paul) of Jinsan, when his mother died, held no Confucian rite and, with his cousin Gwon Sang-yeon (James), burned the family's tablets. The court saw this as abandoning both parents and king, and in December both men were beheaded at Jeonju. This was the Sinhae persecution; how the church's judgment on the rites later changed is taken up in Can a Christian take part in ancestral rites?.

Early in 1795 a Chinese priest, Zhou Wenmo (James), reached Seoul in secret. After King Jeongjo died in 1800, the queen dowager ruling for the boy king banned Catholicism, and the Sinyu persecution began. Jeong Yak-jong (Augustine), who wrote Jugyo yoji (The Essentials of the Lord's Teaching), a catechism in the Korean alphabet for women and common people, Yi Seung-hun, Father Zhou and the woman catechist Gang Wan-suk (Columba), who had hidden him, were executed in 1801, and Jeong Yak-jong's brothers Jeong Yak-jeon and Jeong Yak-yong were exiled. Yi Seung-hun had more than once said he gave up the faith, yet in the end he was put to death. Many historians see factional struggle at court in this persecution too.

That autumn Hwang Sa-yeong (Alexius), hiding by a pottery kiln at Baeron, wrote a long letter on silk to the bishop of Beijing Hwang Sa-yeong, The Silk Letter. Telling the persecution in detail, he begged that Western nations send warships and that the Chinese emperor move the court to allow the faith. The letter was seized before it was sent; he was executed, and the persecution grew fiercer. It has long been criticised as handing the country to foreign power for religious freedom, while some read it as a hunted believer's desperate plea. Either way, it left in Korean minds a deep suspicion that Catholicism came backed by foreign force.

A church waiting for its shepherds: 1839 and Kim Dae-geon

Jeong Yak-jong's son Jeong Ha-sang (Paul, 1795–1839) went to Beijing many times to ask for priests, and with others wrote to the pope. In 1831 Pope Gregory XVI made Korea a vicariate apostolic, separate from Beijing, and entrusted it to the Paris Foreign Missions Society; from 1836 Father Maubant, Father Chastan and Bishop Imbert entered in secret. When the Gihae persecution broke out in 1839, Bishop Imbert gave himself up so that the believers would suffer no more, and urged the two priests to do the same. All three were beheaded at Saenamteo in September, and the next day Jeong Ha-sang was martyred outside the Seosomun gate. Expecting arrest, he had written a defence of the faith for the chief state councillor, and handed it in when seized Jeong Ha-sang, Sangjae sangseo (Letter to the Chief State Councillor).

Kim Dae-geon (Andrew, 1821–1846; Andrew Kim Taegon in the Catholic calendar) lost his father in that persecution. Born at Solmoe to a family that had kept the faith since his great-grandfather, he was chosen by Father Maubant in 1836 and sent with Choe Yang-eop and others to study in Macau. In August 1845, near Shanghai, he became the first Korean priest, and that autumn he brought Bishop Ferréol and Father Daveluy home in a small boat. The next year, seeking a sea route for the missionaries, he was arrested in Hwanghae, and in September 1846 he was martyred at Saenamteo, aged twenty-five. The second Korean priest, Choe Yang-eop (Thomas), walked the hidden mountain villages for twelve years until illness and exhaustion took him in 1861.

The Byeongin persecution, the 103 saints, and today

Early in 1866 the regent Heungseon Daewongun banned Catholicism, and great persecution came again. Nine of the twelve French missionaries, Bishops Berneux and Daveluy among them, were executed; when Father Ridel, who escaped, reported it in China, a French fleet attacked Ganghwa that autumn. The court took the Catholics for traitors, and many were beheaded at Jeoldusan by the Han River. In 1868 a French missionary's part in the merchant Oppert's attempt to dig up the grave of the regent's father made it harsher still. The persecution lasted into the early 1870s, and Dallet and Korean historians count its martyrs in thousands.

These martyrs' stories survive because Bishop Daveluy gathered testimonies at the risk of his life, and from those records Father Dallet published his Histoire de l'Église de Corée in 1874. In May 1984, the Korean church's two hundredth year, Pope John Paul II declared saints in Seoul one hundred and three martyrs of the persecutions of about 1839, 1846 and 1866, among them Kim Dae-geon and Jeong Ha-sang. They were ninety-three Koreans and ten French missionaries, and Catholics remember it as the first canonisation held outside Rome. In August 2014 Pope Francis beatified Yun Ji-chung and 123 companions in Seoul. Every September Korean Catholics keep the month of the martyrs at the shrines where they died.

Still others endured mocking and flogging, and even chains and imprisonment. … The world was not worthy of them. They wandered in deserts and mountains, and hid in caves and holes in the ground.

Hebrews 11:36-38

Of the world not being worthy of them Wesley writes, "It did not deserve so great a blessing" Wesley. The believers of Joseon who hid in mountain villages and lived by making pottery were such people.

For Korean Protestants too, they are the first Christians of their land. They reasoned their way to faith by reading, and with no priest still met to pray and taught one another. Nobles and outcasts, men and women, called one another fellow believers, and books in the Korean alphabet opened the faith to the unlettered. They kept the word, "Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul" (Matthew 10:28), and put the Lord before their lives. Hwang Sa-yeong's letter teaches, too, what is lost when the gospel leans on a strong nation's power.

Catholics and Protestants differ on the sacraments, the ministry and the honouring of saints, but before those who shed their blood for the same Lord they can bow their heads together. The Lord told the church at Smyrna, "Be faithful even unto death, and I will give you the crown of life" (Revelation 2:10). The next lesson, Protestant missions and the beginnings of the Korean church, begins with Gützlaff's visit in 1832 and comes to the Taedong River in 1866, the very year of the Byeongin persecution.

Practice