Andrew Kim Taegŏn and the Korean Martyrs

Life and Ministry

The Korean church is the only major Catholic church in the world founded by a layman without missionary intervention — a young scholar named Yi Seung-hun who had been baptized at Beijing in 1784 returned to the Joseon kingdom and began to baptize his friends. Within a generation there were perhaps ten thousand Korean Catholics, ministered to in secret by a single Chinese priest who entered the country in 1795. The first Korean to be ordained a priest was Andrew Kim Taegŏn, born in 1821 to a noble family with three generations of Catholics already martyred (his great-grandfather, grandfather, and father had all died for the faith). Kim was sent to Macau as a boy of fifteen for seminary training, ordained in Shanghai in 1845, and returned to Korea the same year as the first native Korean priest.

Circumstances of Death

Andrew Kim spent thirteen months in active ministry in Korea before his arrest in June 1846 at Baekryeong Island while attempting to arrange the entry of additional French missionaries. He was held at Seoul, interrogated for three months, and beheaded by sword at the execution ground at Saenamteo by the Han River on September 16, 1846. He was twenty-five. The 1839 persecution that preceded him had killed Bishop Laurent-Joseph-Marius Imbert and dozens of Korean catechists; the 1866 persecution under the Daewongun, the regent for the boy-king Gojong, killed roughly eight thousand Korean Catholics over a period of three years — perhaps the largest single persecution of Christians in nineteenth-century Asia. The 103 martyrs canonized together by Pope John Paul II in Seoul in 1984 represent perhaps a tenth of the documented dead.

Legacy

The Korean church recovered after the Treaty of Tianjin opened the country in 1882 and grew rapidly through the twentieth century; today South Korea has the largest Catholic population in East Asia outside the Philippines and one of the largest Protestant populations of any Asian country. The 1984 canonization at Yoido Plaza in Seoul — the first time a pope had canonized a saint outside Rome — drew an estimated million Korean Catholics. Andrew Kim is a national patron of Korea and the patron of the Korean clergy. The shrine at Saenamteo on the Han River marks his execution.