Andrew Kim Taegon

Catholicism entered Korea as a subject of study before it arrived as a mission. In the late eighteenth century scholars of the Silhak movement obtained Chinese-language Catholic works from the annual embassy to Beijing and debated them as philosophy. In 1784 one of them, Yi Seung-hun, was baptised in Beijing and returned to baptise others. For roughly a decade the resulting community ran its own sacramental life, appointing men to celebrate and to hear confessions, until enquiry to the bishop in Beijing established that this was not permitted and the practice was stopped.

A church founded by readers rather than by missionaries had two consequences. It was lay-led and literate from the start, and it was politically exposed, because a Korean who accepted the prohibition on ancestral rites was refusing the central obligation of Joseon social order. The persecutions followed: 1801, 1839, 1846 and, most severely, 1866, when thousands were killed.

Kim Taegon was born into this. His family had been Catholic for two generations, his great-grandfather died in prison for it, and his father was executed in 1839. Chosen as a boy along with two companions to train for the priesthood, he was taken overland to Macau, studied there through years of upheaval, and returned by way of Manchuria and the Yellow Sea, mapping approaches by which priests might enter a country that admitted none.

He was ordained deacon and then, at Shanghai in August 1845, priest, by the French bishop Jean-Joseph Ferreol, whom he then brought into Korea by sea in a small boat with a lay companion. He was twenty-four. His work over the following year was practical rather than pastoral in the ordinary sense: identifying landing places, arranging contact with Chinese fishing fleets off the Yellow Sea coast, and drawing charts that would let missionaries enter without crossing the guarded northern border.

He was arrested in June 1846 while attempting exactly this, interrogated, and beheaded at Saenamteo on the bank of the Han river in September of that year. The letters he wrote from prison to his congregation and to Bishop Ferreol survive, and they are the reason the record of his last months is unusually full.

He was canonised in Seoul in May 1984 by John Paul II, in a group of one hundred and three Korean martyrs drawn from the persecutions between 1839 and 1867. Because they were canonised together, the group is commemorated on a single feast day under his name and that of Paul Chong Hasang, a lay leader executed in 1839. Korean Catholicism is today one of the larger Christian communities in Asia, and Saenamteo is a shrine.