Saints Andrew Kim Tae-gon, Paul Chong Ha-sang, and Companions

Martyrs

Feast Day

September 20

Life

1821–1846

Canonized

1984

Born

Solmoe, Korea (for Andrew Kim Tae-gon)

Catholicism reached Korea in the eighteenth century by way of Korean ambassadors who encountered the faith in Beijing. By 1784, when the lay scholar Yi Sung-hun was baptized and returned home, a community had formed without the presence of priests. For the next five decades the Korean Church grew under lay leadership amid intermittent persecution by the Joseon dynasty, which regarded Catholicism as subversive of Confucian social order.

Andrew Kim Tae-gon (1821-1846) was Korea's first native-born Catholic priest. After studies in Macao he was ordained at Shanghai in 1845. Returning home, he organized routes for foreign missionaries to enter the country and ministered to the persecuted faithful, working chiefly in disguise. Arrested in 1846, he was tortured and beheaded at Saenamteo in Seoul on 16 September 1846 at the age of twenty-five.

Paul Chong Ha-sang (1795-1839), a lay catechist of noble background, organized the Korean Church for nearly thirty years, repeatedly traveled to Beijing to plead for missionaries and a bishop, and was martyred in the Gihae persecution of 1839. Together with 101 companions, comprising bishops, priests and lay men and women of every age, ranging from the Frenchman Saint Laurent-Marie-Joseph Imbert and his fellow Paris Foreign Missions priests to Korean teenagers, the Korean Martyrs were canonized at Seoul on 6 May 1984 by Saint John Paul II, the first canonization to be celebrated outside Rome since the early Christian centuries.