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Biography

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Agatha Kwon Chin-i (Korean: 권진이 아가타) was a nineteenth-century Korean Catholic laywoman who died as a martyr during the Gihae persecution in Joseon Korea. She is one of the 103 Korean Martyrs recognized as saints by the Catholic Church. According to the records assembled for her cause, she was born in 1820 in Seoul, then the capital of the Joseon kingdom. Korean Catholicism in her generation was still a young and largely lay-led community. It had begun in the 1780s when Korean scholars encountered Catholic books from China, and it grew under intermittent but often severe government prohibition, because the new faith rejected ancestral rites that the Confucian state regarded as essential to social order.

The Gihae persecution of 1839–1840 was among the most intense of these campaigns. After the death of a relatively tolerant queen dowager, conservative officials moved to suppress Catholicism, arresting converts, catechists, and the few remaining missionaries. Agatha Kwon Chin-i was seized in Seoul in the course of this crackdown. Surviving notices of her case, which are brief as is typical for many of the Korean lay martyrs, present her as a young woman who would not perform the required acts of apostasy. She was interrogated and subjected to the corporal punishments then used to force recantation.

On 31 January 1840 she was executed by beheading outside the Small West Gate (Seosomun) of Seoul, a customary site for capital sentences in the capital. She was about twenty years old. Several other Catholics were put to death with her that day, among them Augustine Pak Chong-won, Peter Hong Pyong-ju, Magdalene Son So-byok, Agatha Yi Kyong-i, and Maria Yi In-dok. Individual biographical detail beyond her age, place, and the fact of her martyrdom remains limited; like many of her companions, she is known primarily through official lists, interrogation records, and the collective memory of the Korean Church rather than through an extensive personal vita. She was not a member of a religious order.

Agatha Kwon Chin-i was beatified on 5 July 1925 by Pope Pius XI as one of the seventy-nine Korean martyrs of that cause, and she was canonized on 6 May 1984 by Pope John Paul II in Seoul, together with the full group of 103 Korean Martyrs, during the first papal visit to Korea. The Catholic Church keeps their common feast on 20 September. She is venerated as a lay martyr of the Korean Church; no separate distinctive individual patronages are recorded for her in the standard sources.

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