Feast day: September 20
St. Andrew Kim Taegon & Companions
Korea's first native priest, beheaded at 25, honored with 102 companion martyrs from a church that laypeople founded and sustained without clergy for decades.
The Catholic faith came to Korea in a way almost unique in the history of the Church: not through missionaries, but through Koreans themselves. In the late eighteenth century scholars who had encountered Catholic books from China embraced the faith, baptized one another, and built up a thriving lay community years before any priest arrived — a Church founded and long sustained by lay men and women in a kingdom that fiercely forbade it.
Into this hidden, persecuted Church Andrew Kim Taegon was born in 1821, the son of a Catholic family; his own father would die a martyr. As a boy he was smuggled out of the country and made an arduous journey to Macau to study for the priesthood, and in 1845 he was ordained the first native-born Korean priest, returning at once to his homeland to minister in secret to the scattered faithful.
His priestly ministry lasted barely a year. Moving by night, arranging for missionaries to be smuggled across the sea, hunted by the authorities, he was arrested in 1846. Though offered his life if he would renounce his faith, he refused, and used even his imprisonment to write letters of encouragement to his flock. He was tortured and beheaded near Seoul at only twenty-five.
Andrew Kim was one of many thousands of Korean Christians — bishops, the lone priest, but overwhelmingly ordinary lay people, men, women, and children — who died in the great persecutions of the nineteenth century rather than abandon their faith. One hundred and three of these martyrs, with Andrew Kim and the lay catechist Paul Chong Hasang at their head, were canonized together in 1984, and are honored as the patrons of Korea.
Christianity entered Korea through books — laypeople studied smuggled texts and baptized each other. A church founded by readers, watered by martyrs.
“This is my last hour of life, listen to me attentively: if I have held communication with foreigners, it has been for my religion and for my God.”
— St. Andrew Kim Taegon & Companions
Image: Andrew_Kim.jpg: Swiss James derivative work: Maliepa (CC BY 2.0), via Wikimedia Commons.
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