124 Korean Martyrs

The 124 Korean Martyrs, known in the Catholic Church as Blessed Paul Yun Ji-chung and 123 Companions, were Korean Catholics put to death for their faith under the Joseon dynasty between 1791 and 1888. The Catholic community in Korea did not begin through resident foreign missionaries. In the late eighteenth century, Korean Confucian scholars encountered Christian books brought from China, and in 1784 Yi Seung-hun was baptized in Beijing and returned to form a lay-led church. Within a few years that community came into conflict with the Confucian ritual order, above all ancestral rites, which converts came to treat as incompatible with Christian worship. The clash with the state produced a series of persecutions lasting nearly a century. Estimates of the total number of Korean Catholics killed in those campaigns run into the thousands; the 124 are a defined group whose martyrdoms were later examined by the Holy See, distinct from the 103 Korean Martyrs canonized in 1984.

Paul Yun Ji-chung, a member of the yangban scholarly class from Jinsan in Jeolla province, became the first of these martyrs. After baptism he and his cousin James Kwon Sang-yeon destroyed their family's ancestral tablets. Arrested and interrogated, they refused to recant. Yun was beheaded at Jeonju in 1791. Their deaths opened a long period of intermittent but severe repression. A major wave followed in 1801, the Sinyu persecution, after the death of King Jeongjo, when the court treated Catholicism as a threat to ritual and political orthodoxy. Among those killed in that year was Columba Kang Wan-suk, a widow and leading catechist who had sheltered the community. Further executions continued through the nineteenth century, overlapping in time with, but remaining canonically separate from, the martyrdoms of 1839, 1846 and 1866 that supplied most of the 103 saints. The 124 beatified in 2014 were those whose causes had been more recently documented.

The group was socially mixed. It included scholars, farmers, artisans, women and the elderly, and the martyrs were lay people rather than clergy or members of religious orders. They died in various places across the Korean peninsula, often by beheading, strangulation or other forms of capital punishment prescribed for those judged guilty of subverting state orthodoxy. Contemporary records and later hagiographical investigations preserved names, family connections and the circumstances of many of these deaths, which allowed the Church to treat them as companions of Paul Yun. Their graves were frequently unmarked; relics and memorials were gathered only in later generations at shrines associated with the persecutions.

On 16 August 2014, during an apostolic journey to South Korea, Pope Francis beatified Paul Yun Ji-chung and his 123 companions at an open-air Mass in Gwanghwamun Square in Seoul, before a congregation reported to number around one million. The beatification recognized their deaths as martyrdom in odium fidei. They have not been canonized. Their memory is honored in the Korean Catholic Church alongside that of Saint Andrew Kim Taegon, Saint Paul Chong Hasang and the other canonized martyrs, as a witness to a church that was born and long sustained by the laity under prolonged persecution.