Agatha Kim A-gi

Agatha Kim A-gi was born in 1787 in Seoul, capital of the Joseon kingdom on the Korean peninsula, into a family that did not practice Christianity. She married a husband who was likewise not a Catholic. Of poor and uneducated background, she was remembered in the early Korean Christian community as a woman of simple and straightforward character. She came to know the Catholic faith through her sister-in-law, who taught her the principal doctrines of the Church. Agatha wished to be baptized, but she found it extremely difficult to memorize the required prayers and catechetical formulas. Traditional accounts emphasize that she could not retain even the Our Father, the Hail Mary, or the Ten Commandments. Because of this, those responsible for instruction delayed her baptism for a long time, and she remained outside the sacramental life of the Church into middle age.

In 1839 the Joseon government, acting during the early years of King Heonjong under the regency of Queen Sunwon, intensified a campaign against Catholics known as the Gihae persecution. Agatha was arrested in Seoul and confined with other suspected Christians. According to the hagiographical tradition recorded by the Korean Church, a catechist among the prisoners baptized her in jail, so that she entered the Church only after her arrest. When she was interrogated, she could not give a sophisticated account of Catholic teaching, yet she openly declared that she was a Christian and would not abandon God. Officials demanded that she deny the faith and perform rites signifying apostasy; she refused. She was subjected to the tortures customarily used in Joseon criminal procedure against recusant Catholics.

On 24 May 1839 Agatha was led out to the execution ground beyond the Small West Gate, Seosomun, in Seoul, a site at which many Catholics were put to death in that year. There she was beheaded. She was about fifty-three years of age. Several other lay Catholics were executed in the same wave of killings. The Gihae persecution formed one of the major episodes in the nineteenth-century history of the Church in Korea, in which a largely lay community, long without resident clergy, suffered repeated official suppression.

Agatha Kim A-gi was beatified by Pope Pius XI on 5 July 1925 as one of seventy-nine martyrs of Korea, principally from the persecutions of 1839 and 1846. On 6 May 1984, during his apostolic visit to Korea, Pope John Paul II canonized her in Seoul together with Saint Andrew Kim Taegon, Saint Paul Chong Hasang, and one hundred other companions, bringing the group known as the Korean Martyrs to 103 saints. Their collective feast is kept on 20 September. Agatha is honored as a lay martyr; historical sources do not attach to her a separate list of patronages beyond her share in the veneration of that group.