Andrew Kim Taegon

Andrew Kim Taegon (Kim Tae-gon; baptismal name Andrew) was born in 1821 at Solmoe in Chungcheong Province, in Joseon Korea. He came from a family already marked by the Catholic faith, which had entered Korea in the late eighteenth century through lay scholars returning from Beijing rather than through resident missionaries. The Joseon court treated Catholicism as a subversive foreign teaching and launched repeated persecutions. Kim’s great-grandfather was among those put to death in an earlier wave of violence; his father, Ignatius Kim Che-jun, was executed in 1839 during the Gihae persecution. In that climate of secrecy and danger, the boy grew up in the underground Church. Korean Catholics at that time had almost no priests of their own; the sacraments depended on rare, clandestine visits by foreign missionaries, chiefly from the Paris Foreign Missions Society.

Selected as a teenager for priestly studies, he left Korea around 1836 and made a long and hazardous journey to Macau. There, and later in other parts of the Chinese mission field, he received seminary formation under the Paris Foreign Missions Society. After nearly a decade of study he was ordained to the priesthood in Shanghai in 1845 by Bishop Jean Ferréol, vicar apostolic of Korea. He was the first Korean-born Catholic priest. Shortly afterward he returned in secret to his homeland to begin pastoral work. For roughly a year he moved among Catholic communities, administered the sacraments, worked on translations, and tried to open a safer route by which more missionaries could enter Korea by sea.

That effort led to his arrest in 1846. He was taken to Seoul, imprisoned, interrogated, and tortured. From confinement he wrote pastoral letters urging Korean Christians not to abandon the faith. On 16 September 1846 he was beheaded at Saenamteo, a riverside execution ground in Seoul, at about the age of twenty-five. Several companions were put to death in the same persecution. His priesthood had lasted only a little more than a year, but his status as the first native Korean priest and his death at a young age made him a focal point of Korean Catholic identity and memory.

The Holy See recognized him among the Korean martyrs: he was beatified on 5 July 1925 by Pope Pius XI with seventy-eight others, and canonized on 6 May 1984 in Seoul by Pope John Paul II together with 102 companions. Their collective feast is kept on 20 September. Andrew Kim Taegon is invoked as patron of the Korean clergy. His birthplace at Solmoe has become a major shrine and pilgrimage center, and he is the best-known individual among the Korean Martyrs canonized in the twentieth century.