Sts. Andrew Kim Taegon, Paul Chong Hasang and Companions

Their story

The Catholic Church in Korea is unusual: it was founded not by missionaries but by lay people. In the late 1700s a group of Korean scholars came across Christian books from China, studied them and came to believe. One of them was baptized in Beijing and returned home to share the faith. For decades the young Church grew with almost no priests, led by lay men and women. It also faced fierce persecution, and over the next century around ten thousand Korean Catholics were killed for their faith. Andrew Kim Taegon was born in 1821 into a Catholic family, and his father was martyred when he was a teenager. He traveled to the Portuguese colony of Macau to study for the priesthood, and in 1845 he was ordained in Shanghai, becoming the first Korean-born priest. He returned home to minister secretly to his people, but within a year he was arrested. He was tortured and beheaded near Seoul in 1846, at the age of 25. Paul Chong Hasang was a lay catechist whose father and uncle had been martyred. He walked to Beijing many times to beg the bishop to send priests to Korea, and he wrote a defense of the faith addressed to the government. He was martyred in 1839. In 1984 Pope St. John Paul II traveled to Seoul and canonized 103 Korean martyrs, including priests, catechists, mothers, fathers and young people.