Vigils Reading – St Andrew Kim & Companions

THE KOREAN MARTYRS

A reading from Butler’s Lives of the Saints1

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Christianity came late to Korea, for it was the policy of that country’s

rulers to keep it isolated from foreign influence. Not until the late eighteenth

century, more than two hundred years after Francis Xavier had reached Japan,

did the Church begin very slowly to take root. The earliest missionaries were

lay people who had been converted outside their country. Pietro Yi was baptized

at Pechino in 1784: he was the first Korean to be received into the church, but

he was also the first to apostatize, when persecution broke out in 1791.

Through the last years of the eighteenth-century persecution was

sporadic and localized, but in 1801 it was extended to the whole of the country.

One Chinese priest, who had succeeded in entering Korea, offered himself for

martyrdom in the hope that his death would bring the sufferings of his fellow

Christians to an end. He was beheaded on May 31, 1801, and the persecution

went on.

Yet these early martyrs were not among those canonized by Pope John

Paul II in the cathedral of Seoul, where the relics of so many of them lie… Of

the many thousand – perhaps more than 8,000 not counting those who died of

cold or starvation as they fled the tortures of the persecutors – 103 were chosen

by name as representatives of the rest. They were selected from those who died

in the persecutions which began in 1839 and lasted until 1846, and those which

lasted from 1861 to the beginning of 1866.

By the time of the renewed persecution – brought about both in 1839 and

1861 by the return to power of the conservative faction of the Korean ruling class

– there was a small number of missionaries in the country, two French priests13

and a bishop, all three died by beheading on September 21, 1839. On September

16, 1846 there died Andrew Kim, the first and at that time only, Korean-born-

priest. Two more bishops, and a number of other French missionaries died in

the later persecution.

These were the clergy, but by far the greatest number of those named as

saints by the pope near the spot where so many of them had died by beheading

or strangulation, were ordinary lay people. Some of them were of high rank,

but most were ordinary men and women, often linked by family ties as well as

by the bonds of faith, mothers and their children, wives and their husbands. For

several their crime was that they had worked as catechist in spreading the faith

which, until 1881, was referred to in official documents as “the perverse

doctrine”.

The persecution…lasted until 1866. Religious liberty was conceded in

1886, and today the Church flourishes. Though the 103 whose sanctity was

formally recognized were canonized together, they had been beatified in two

groups: those of the earlier persecution by Pius XI in July 1925, those of the

later one by Paul VI in October 1968.