Intret in conspectu tuo, Domine, gemitus compeditorum: redde vicinis nostris septuplum in sinu eorum: vindica sanguinem sanctorum tuorum, qui effusus est. “Let the sighing of the prisoners come in before Thee, O Lord: render to our neighbours sevenfold in their bosom: revenge the blood of Thy saints, which hath been shed.” — Introit of the Mass Intret, Common of Many Martyrs (Ps. 78:11-12, 10)
A note on the calendar
These martyrs are not found in the 1962 Missal. The reason is not neglect but chronology: seventy-nine of them were raised to the altars as beati by Pius XI on the fifth of July, 1925, twenty-four more by Paul VI in 1968, and the whole hundred and three were canonized only on the sixth of May, 1984, by John Paul II — at Seoul, the first canonization performed outside Rome. Under the older discipline the cultus of beati is proper, not universal; their feast was kept in Korea and among the Paris Foreign Missions, not in the Roman calendar. The twentieth of September as their common feast belongs to the reformed books.
In the traditional calendar this year the twentieth of September is the Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost, and the third-class feast of Ss. Eustace and Companions, Martyrs, yields to it. That is not an unhappy coincidence for what follows. Eustace and his household were said to have died together under Hadrian; the Koreans died together under the house of Yi; and the Church has only one Mass for both of them, because she has only one doctrine about martyrdom.
I. A Church that began with a book
There is no other case like it in the history of the Church.
The Gospel came to Rome by Peter and Paul, to Gaul by Irenaeus, to England by Augustine of Canterbury, to India by Xavier — always by a sent man, an apostle, a preacher. It came to Korea by a crate of books.
Korea in the eighteenth century was the Hermit Kingdom, sealed against the world except for one annual tributary embassy to Peking. Korean scholars returning from that embassy brought back, among the curiosities of the capital, the Chinese-language works of the Jesuits — above all Matteo Ricci’s T’ien-chu Shih-i, “The True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven.” These were read, at first, as Sŏhak, “Western learning,” a branch of philosophy. A circle of young Confucian scholars of the yangban class, meeting to study them near Seoul in the 1770s and 1780s, came slowly to the conclusion that the books were not philosophy. They were about a God who had become man and died, and who was to be worshipped.
They had no priest, no bishop, no sacrament, no missionary. They had the text, and they believed it.
II. The baptism of 1784
In the winter of 1783 one of their number, Yi Sŭng-hun, was to accompany his father on the embassy to Peking. His friend Yi Pyŏk charged him with an errand: find the Western priests, learn everything, obtain books, and get himself baptized. He did. In the spring of 1784 Yi Sŭng-hun was baptized in Peking with the name Peter — the first Korean of his class to receive the sacrament — and came home with books, crucifixes and medals.
He then baptized Yi Pyŏk, who took the name John the Baptist, and Kwŏn Il-sin, who took Francis Xavier. These three are called in Korea the founding fathers of her Church. Within a few years there were thousands of believers, gathered in houses, reading, praying, and teaching one another, across every class — noblemen, artisans, women of the inner quarters, slaves.
Honesty requires that the founders be described as they were. Yi Sŭng-hun, under interrogation and family pressure, renounced the faith more than once before his death in 1801, and he is not among the hundred and three. The Church canonizes what she can see and leaves the rest to God. It is worth noticing that the Korean Church did not depend on the perseverance of her most distinguished man.
III. Zeal corrected: the false hierarchy
By 1786 the community felt the want of the sacraments so acutely that they supplied one for themselves. Reasoning from what they had read, the laymen chose from among their number bishops and priests, and these began to hear confessions, to confirm, and to offer what they took to be Mass. For some two years the Church in Korea administered sacraments that did not exist.
Then a doubt arose, and they did the one thing that saved them: they wrote to the Bishop of Peking and asked. The answer came back that they had no orders, that no man takes this honour to himself but he that is called by God as Aaron was (Heb. 5:4), and that they must stop. They stopped at once, and spent the next forty-five years begging Peking and Rome to send them a priest.
This episode ought to be pondered by anyone tempted to think that fervour is self-authenticating. The Korean laymen were sincere, learned, and generous, and for two years they were simply wrong; the Church is hierarchical by the institution of her Founder, and no amount of desire supplies for the imposition of hands. What made them saints was not the invention but the submission. They loved the Mass enough to obey the Church that alone could give it to them, and to wait.
IV. The tablets, and the first blood (1791)
The collision, when it came, was over the dead.
The Holy See had ruled in the Chinese Rites controversy — Clement XI in Ex illa die (1715), confirmed by Benedict XIV in Ex quo singulari (1742) — that the Confucian ancestral rites, as then practised, could not be reconciled with divine worship. Korean Catholics accordingly burned their ancestral tablets and ceased the sacrifices.
In the Confucian order of Chosŏn this was not a religious eccentricity. Filial piety was the constitution of the state, and a man who refused the rites was, in the plain sense of the law, a rebel and a beast. In 1791 Paul Yun Chi-ch’ung and his cousin James Kwŏn Sang-yŏn, having buried Yun’s mother without the tablet, were beheaded at Chŏnju. They are the first martyrs of Korea. From that day to 1886 the Church in that country was, in the eyes of the law, a criminal conspiracy, and everything else follows.
V. One priest, and the persecution of 1801
In 1794 the Bishop of Peking at last sent a priest: Father James Zhou Wen-mo, a Chinese, who crossed the frozen Yalu in disguise. He found some four thousand Christians. He was the only priest in the kingdom, hidden in Seoul, largely in the house of the catechist Columba Kang Wan-suk, who organized the women’s apostolate and whose courage is remembered in every Korean account. By 1800 the faithful numbered about ten thousand, and nearly all of them had never seen him.
In 1801, under the regency, came the Sinyu persecution. Father Zhou, learning that Christians were being tortured to reveal him, gave himself up and was beheaded on the last day of May. Chŏng Yak-chong Augustine, who had written in the vernacular the first Korean catechism, the Chugyo yoji, died with the leading men of the community. Three hundred or more were executed, and the countryside filled with Catholics fleeing into the mountains to make charcoal and pottery, which is how the faith spread to the provinces.
One episode of that year must be told, because it is instructive in the same way that a saint’s fault is instructive. A young convert, Hwang Sa-yŏng, hiding in a kiln, composed a letter on silk to the Bishop of Peking asking that a Western fleet be sent to compel toleration. It was intercepted. Nothing did more to persuade the Korean court that Catholicism was treason in the guise of religion, and every martyr for the next sixty-five years was interrogated under the shadow of it. Zeal without prudence is not a small fault. It cost other men their heads.
VI. Thirty years of letters: Paul Chŏng Hasang
The son of Augustine Chŏng, orphaned by the persecution of 1801, was Paul Chŏng Ha-sang (b. 1795). What he did with his life was, on the face of it, unremarkable: he took service as a servant to an official who travelled to Peking, and for some twenty years he went with the embassy, nine times or more, carrying petitions.
The petitions asked for priests. They were addressed to the Bishop of Peking and at last, over the heads of Peking, to the Holy See: that Korea be made a vicariate of her own and given shepherds. He wrote as a layman pleading for a hierarchy his country had never possessed, in a kingdom where possessing the letters he carried was a capital crime, and he did it for two decades without seeing any result.
He also wrote, for his judges, the Sangjae sangsŏ — an apology for the faith addressed to the prime minister, arguing that a religion commanding men to honour God, obey the king and revere their parents could not be the enemy of the state. It is the first work of Catholic apologetics composed by a Korean.
In 1831 Gregory XVI erected the Vicariate Apostolic of Korea and entrusted it to the Paris Foreign Missions. Paul Chŏng’s letters had been answered.
VII. The shepherds come, and are killed (1831-1839)
The first vicar apostolic, Barthélemy Bruguière, died in Manchuria in 1835 without ever setting foot in his diocese. Father Pierre-Philibert Maubant crossed the border on foot that winter; Father Jacques-Honoré Chastan followed in 1836; and in 1837 came the new vicar, Bishop Laurent-Marie-Joseph Imbert, of Marignane in Provence.
They lived as hunted men. By day they hid in the houses of the faithful; by night they walked the villages in Korean dress, baptizing, hearing confessions, offering Mass before dawn. Within three years the number of the baptized had roughly doubled. Imbert began to teach Latin and theology to Paul Chŏng Hasang with a view to ordaining him — the first native priest — and to a handful of boys.
In 1839 the Kihae persecution broke. When it became clear that Christians were being tortured to give up the whereabouts of the foreign priests, Bishop Imbert surrendered himself, and wrote the sentence that is carved over his memory: in extremity, the good shepherd lays down his life for his sheep. He then sent word to Maubant and Chastan advising them to do the same. They did not argue. They came in.
On the twenty-first of September, 1839, the three were beheaded at Saenamt’ŏ, on the sand by the Han River outside Seoul. Paul Chŏng Ha-sang was beheaded at the Small West Gate on the twenty-second, one day after the bishop who was to have ordained him. His mother Cecilia Yu died in prison; his sister Elizabeth Chŏng was executed. Among the dead of that year was Peter Yu Tae-ch’ŏl, thirteen years old, who was beaten, burned with coals, and at last strangled in his cell, and Columba Kim Hyo-im, who with another young woman endured in prison an outrage that the records describe and that need not be described here.
VIII. Andrew Kim Taegŏn
Kim Tae-gŏn was born at Solmoe on the twenty-first of August, 1821, into a family already soaked in this history: his great-grandfather had died in prison for the faith, and his father, Ignatius Kim Che-jun, would be martyred in 1839 and is among the hundred and three.
In 1836 Father Maubant chose three boys to be trained as priests. At fifteen Andrew walked with his companions across Korea and Manchuria to Macao — a journey of months — and entered the seminary of the Paris Foreign Missions. One of the three died on the road. He learned Latin, French and theology; he was ordained deacon; and because no one could enter Korea by land any longer, he spent years working out how to get a missionary in by sea, charting the coast and the islands and sending the maps back to his superiors. He entered and left his own country more than once by fishing boat.
He was ordained priest in Shanghai on the seventeenth of August, 1845, by Bishop Jean-Joseph Ferréol — the first Korean priest — and brought the bishop home with him in a leaking junk. He had thirteen months. He was arrested in June 1846 while arranging a sea route in the Hwanghae islands, and beheaded at Saenamt’ŏ on the sixteenth of September, 1846. He was twenty-five years old.
From prison he wrote a last letter to his flock, and its argument is worth keeping. He does not tell them that suffering is pleasant or that rescue is coming. He tells them that the Lord entered the world and suffered of His own will and founded the Church by His Passion and makes it grow by the sufferings of the faithful; that the powers of this world have raged against the Church from the beginning and have not prevailed; that they must hold together, help one another, and wait for God to have mercy; and that those who have fallen should be received back and not despised. He signed himself their brother and asked them to be at peace.
He is the patron of the Korean clergy.
IX. 1866: the great slaughter
The worst was last. In 1866 the regent Taewŏn’gun, under pressure from a Russian approach on the northern frontier and from a court that identified Catholicism with foreign invasion, ordered a general extermination. There were then perhaps twenty thousand Catholics and twelve French priests in Korea.
Bishop Siméon-François Berneux was beheaded at Saenamt’ŏ on the eighth of March, and with him and after him the young priests Just de Bretenières, Louis Beaulieu and Pierre-Henri Dorie — men of twenty-eight and thirty, who had been in the country a few months and had barely learned the language. Berneux’s coadjutor, Bishop Antoine Daveluy, who had spent twenty-one years in Korea and had painstakingly collected the acts of the earlier martyrs (the materials from which Dallet’s Histoire de l’Église de Corée was written), succeeded him as vicar apostolic on the eighth of March, was arrested on the eleventh, and was beheaded on Good Friday, the thirtieth of March, 1866, at Galmaemot by the sea, with Fathers Aumaître and Huin and the catechists Luke Hwang Sŏk-tu and Joseph Chang Chu-gi. He had asked that the execution be put off one day so that he might die on the day his Master died. It was granted.
The killing went on for years afterward. The numbers are not exactly known; the common estimate for the whole century of persecution is between eight and ten thousand dead. Of the hundred and three canonized, eleven are priests and ninety-two are laymen and laywomen — which is itself the truest statistic about this Church.
X. The vindication
Religious liberty came to Korea in substance with the treaty of 1886, when the surviving Christians came down from the mountains and found that there were still tens of thousands of them.
Pius XI beatified seventy-nine of the martyrs of 1839 and 1846 on the fifth of July, 1925. Paul VI beatified twenty-four more, chiefly of 1866, on the sixth of October, 1968. John Paul II canonized all one hundred and three at Yŏŭido in Seoul on the sixth of May, 1984, on the second centenary of Peter Yi’s baptism in Peking. In 2014 Pope Francis beatified a further hundred and twenty-four of the earlier martyrs, Paul Yun Chi-ch’ung and his companions, including Father Zhou Wen-mo and Columba Kang Wan-suk.
The Church that began with a crate of books and no priest is today among the larger Catholic bodies of Asia, and sends missionaries abroad.
XI. What the lives teach
That the martyr is made by the cause, not by the pain. Non poena sed causa facit martyrem, says St. Augustine (cf. Ep. 89; Sermo 285). The Koreans were not killed for being foreign, nor for politics, though the state told itself otherwise. They were killed because they would not burn incense to a tablet and would not deny Christ, and they could have walked free any day by saying four words. St. Thomas teaches that martyrdom is the chief act of fortitude and the highest testimony of charity, because in it a man surrenders the greatest thing he possesses in this life for the greatest Good (Summa Theologiae II-II, q. 124, aa. 2-3). A thirteen-year-old in a Seoul prison performed the highest act of the moral virtues.
That the faith is carried by the laity when it must be, and by the priesthood when it can be. Ninety-two of the hundred and three were laypeople. For fifty years the Korean Church had no priest at all and was held together by catechists, by mothers teaching in the inner rooms, by men copying books by hand. And yet what those laypeople spent fifty years doing was asking for priests — walking to Peking, writing to Rome, waiting. The Korean Church is at once the strongest argument for the lay apostolate and the strongest refutation of the notion that it can replace the altar. Tertullian’s semen est sanguis Christianorum is only half the sentence; the other half is that the seed is watered by the sacraments.
That the blood of the martyrs is not wasted, and the harvest is not on our schedule. Paul Chŏng Ha-sang carried petitions for twenty years and was beheaded the day after the bishop he had obtained for his country. Andrew Kim was a priest for thirteen months. Just de Bretenières had hardly learned to say “God” in Korean. Measured by output, these are failed lives. The Church measures them otherwise, and the country in which they failed now counts its Catholics in millions.
Practice
Examine. Where would I deny Christ — not by apostasy, which I do not fear, but by silence? Name the room: the office, the family table, the group of friends where the faith is the one subject not raised. The Korean martyrs were asked a single question and answered it. Most of us are asked the same question in softer forms, several times a week.
Do. Two things suit this feast. Pray deliberately this week for the Church under persecution now — in North Korea, where the Church of these martyrs has been erased above ground; in China, in Nigeria, in the Middle East. And make an act of thanksgiving for the sacraments you can receive without risk, remembering that ten thousand Koreans went to their death having received the Eucharist once or twice in their lives, or never.
Pray. The Collect of the Common of Many Martyrs:
Deus, qui nos concedis sanctorum Martyrum tuorum natalitia colere: da nobis in aeterna beatitudine de eorum societate gaudere.
“O God, who grantest us to keep the birthday of Thy holy Martyrs: give us to rejoice in their fellowship in everlasting blessedness.”
Or, more simply, the sentence the Church sets in the mouth of the martyrs in the Gospel of their Mass: In patientia vestra possidebitis animas vestras (Luke 21:19).
Devote. The Sorrowful Mysteries, with attention to the Scourging and the Crowning with Thorns; or the Litany of the Saints, said slowly, for the persecuted Church.
If you wish to go deeper: the Lives of the Saints path continues with the martyrs of the missions — the Japanese martyrs of Nagasaki, the North American martyrs, the martyrs of Vietnam and of China — and with the theology of martyrdom in the Fathers. The Church History path takes up the Chinese Rites controversy, the Paris Foreign Missions, and the whole question of how the Gospel meets a civilization that is neither pagan nor Christian but Confucian. The Theology and Doctrine path treats fortitude and martyrdom in St. Thomas, and the necessity of apostolic succession which the Korean laymen discovered the hard way.
Sancti Martyres Coreani, orate pro nobis.
Sources consulted: Charles Dallet, “Histoire de l’Église de Corée” (1874), resting largely on the collections of Bishop Daveluy; the Catholic Encyclopedia (1910), s.v. “Korea”; the New Catholic Encyclopedia, s.v. “Korea, Martyrs of”; the historical materials of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of Korea and of the Missions Étrangères de Paris. Romanizations of Korean names follow the forms used in the canonization documents where these differ from current usage.