Andrew Chŏng Hwa-gyŏng

Andrew Chŏng Hwa-gyŏng (Korean: 정화경; baptismal name Andrea) was a nineteenth-century Korean Catholic lay catechist and martyr. He was born in 1807 in Seoul, in the Joseon kingdom. Catholicism had taken root in Korea only a generation earlier, after Yi Sŭng-hun’s baptism in Beijing in 1784, and it spread largely through lay initiative because foreign clergy could enter the country only with great difficulty and at long intervals. In that clandestine setting Chŏng converted and became a catechist, or hoejang, a local leader who instructed converts, organized prayer, and helped hold together underground communities in and around the capital when priests were absent or in hiding.

The Joseon court treated Catholicism as a heterodox teaching that rejected ancestral rites, challenged Confucian hierarchy, and seemed to open the door to Western influence. Repeated persecutions had already taken many lives in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. A severe new campaign, remembered as the Kihae persecution, began in 1839 and swept up both the few remaining missionaries and numerous Korean laity. Chŏng was arrested in the course of this crackdown. Interrogation and torture were used to compel recantation and to extract the names of other believers. Surviving notices of his case, which are brief as is typical for most of the Korean lay martyrs, record that he refused to apostatize.

He was executed by beheading on 23 January 1840 outside the Small West Gate (Sŏsomun) of Seoul, a customary public execution ground for Catholics. He was about thirty-three years old. His death belongs to the cluster of martyrdoms from 1839–1840 that later formed a large part of the group known as the 103 Korean Martyrs. Because the early Korean Church was so often without resident clergy, the witness of catechists such as Chŏng was regarded by later Korean Catholics as especially significant: the faith had been planted and kept alive in large measure by laypeople.

Chŏng was included among the Korean martyrs beatified by Pope Pius XI on 5 July 1925. On 6 May 1984, during an apostolic visit to Korea, Pope John Paul II canonized him together with Saint Andrew Kim Taegŏn, Saint Paul Chŏng Ha-sang, and their companions. The group is commemorated on 20 September in the General Roman Calendar. Detailed personal anecdotes about Chŏng beyond his status as catechist, his arrest, and his execution are scarce; what is known rests mainly on the martyr lists compiled by the Korean Church from interrogation records and community memory.