Sts. Andrew Kim Taegon and Korean Martyrs

On September 20 the Church keeps the Memorial of Sts. Andrew Kim Taegon, Paul Chong Hasang, and Companions — the 103 Korean martyrs canonized by Pope John Paul II on May 6, 1984, in Seoul, in the first canonization Mass ever held outside Vatican territory. The Korean Church is unique in Catholic history: it was founded not by missionaries but by laypeople. Around 1784, a Korean scholar named Yi Seung-hun (Peter), baptized in Beijing by French Jesuits, returned to Korea and gathered a Christian community from the Silhak ("Practical Learning") school of scholars who had read Christian books brought from China. The first request to Rome for priests was sent via Beijing in 1789.

Andrew Kim Taegon (1821-1846) was the first native Korean priest. Born at Solmoe to a family of converts — his father, Ignatius Kim, was martyred in 1814 — he studied at the Macau seminary, was ordained in Shanghai on August 17, 1845, by Bishop Ferréol, and returned secretly to Korea. Arrested while arranging safe passage for missionaries, he was tortured and beheaded at the Han River near Seoul on September 16, 1846, at the age of twenty-five. His final letter to his parish read: "We have received baptism 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?"

Paul Chong Hasang (1795-1839) was a lay apostle and catechist who served as a government interpreter, travelling to Beijing to petition the Holy See to establish a vicariate in Korea. His written defense of the faith so impressed his judges that they acknowledged its truth — yet still demanded he renounce Christianity. He refused and was martyred in 1839, in the Kihae Persecution. The 103 canonized martyrs include three French missionary bishops of the Paris Foreign Missions — among them Bishop Laurent-Marie-Joseph Imbert, whose last words before execution on September 21, 1839 were "I am the bishop; the others are catechists."

The major persecution was the Byeongin of 1866-1867, in which thousands were killed. In 2001 John Paul II beatified a further 124 martyrs of that persecution in Seoul. The September 20 memorial is kept as a solemnity in the Korean proper calendar — the national founding-feast of the Korean Church.

The pilgrimage sites of the Korean martyrs are concentrated around Seoul: Jeoldusan, the "Mountain of Beheading" on the Han River cliffs where many Byeongin martyrs were executed, now the principal shrine of the Korean martyrs; Saenamteo, the execution site of Andrew Kim Taegon and the French missionaries; and Myeongdong Cathedral, the mother church of Korean Catholicism, which holds relics of the martyrs. Haemi, in South Chungcheong, is the fortress where hundreds of Byeongin-era Catholics were held and executed — the Haemi Martyrdom Shrine keeps their memory.