Agatha Yi

Agatha Yi was a Korean Catholic martyr of the nineteenth century and is numbered among the one hundred and three Korean Martyrs of the Joseon period canonized by the Catholic Church. She was born in 1824 in Seoul, capital of the Joseon kingdom, into a Catholic family at a time when Christianity was prohibited by law and its practice was punished by the state. Her father, Augustine Yi Kwang-hon, a catechist, was arrested and put to death for the faith during the Gihae persecution of 1839. Raised as a Catholic from childhood, Agatha remained unmarried and is venerated as a virgin martyr.

In the aftermath of her father's execution, Agatha, then in her mid-teens, was herself arrested. Surviving notices from the beatification processes and from Korean Catholic tradition record that young women of Catholic families were interrogated and tortured in an effort to make them recant. Agatha is described as having refused to apostatize. Precise day-to-day details of her imprisonment are sparse, as is typical for many of the lesser-known companions among the Korean martyrs, whose lives were reconstructed from official interrogation records and from the memory of the local church.

On 9 January 1840 Agatha Yi was executed in Seoul at about sixteen years of age. Catholics condemned in the capital were commonly put to death at the Small West Gate, known as Seosomun. She is listed among a group of believers killed on that date. Because the documentary basis for individual Korean martyrs of this rank is often brief, many personal particulars beyond her parentage, her youth, her virginity, and the fact and approximate circumstances of her martyrdom cannot be independently verified from surviving sources.

She was beatified on 5 July 1925 by Pope Pius XI as one of the seventy-nine Korean martyrs associated with the persecutions of the 1830s and 1840s. Pope John Paul II canonized her on 6 May 1984 in Seoul, together with Saint Andrew Kim Taegon, Saint Paul Chong Hasang, and their companions, during an apostolic visit to Korea. The Catholic Church commemorates the Korean Martyrs collectively on 20 September. Agatha Yi is honored as a virgin and martyr; no widely attested individual patronages are attached to her name apart from her place in that company.