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Biography

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Anna Kim Chang-gŭm (Korean: 김창금 안나) was a Korean Catholic laywoman and martyr of the nineteenth century, counted among the 103 Martyr Saints of Korea. She was born in 1789 in Seoul, in the Joseon kingdom, into a Catholic family at a time when the Church in Korea still existed largely as an underground lay community. Korean Catholicism had taken root in the late eighteenth century through scholarly and lay initiative rather than through a resident hierarchy, and by her childhood the faith was already subject to intermittent but severe state prohibition. She received instruction in Catholic doctrine from an early age. Surviving notices of her life, which are brief and derive chiefly from the later beatification process, describe her as humble, gentle, and constant in prayer.

She never married and is remembered as a virgin living in the world, not as a member of a religious institute; there were no convents in Joseon Korea. She belonged to the urban Catholic network of Seoul, which gathered in secret for catechesis, recitation of prayers, and, when a missionary priest was present, for the sacraments. Individual anecdotes about her family relations, occupation, or daily work are not securely preserved in the standard hagiographical record, which for many of the less famous among the 103 martyrs is limited to baptismal name, age, place, and manner of death.

The Gihae persecution of 1839, launched by the Joseon court against Catholics as practitioners of a forbidden teaching, swept up large numbers of believers in the capital. Anna Kim Chang-gŭm was arrested that year, imprisoned in Seoul, and interrogated. Like other Korean Catholics of 1839 she was pressed to renounce the faith; she refused. She endured beating and the hardships of prison. On 20 September 1839 she was taken to the execution ground outside the Small West Gate (Seosomun) of Seoul and beheaded. She was about fifty-one years old. That same season of 1839 saw the martyrdom of numerous other Korean laypeople and of the French missionaries Laurent-Joseph-Marius Imbert, Pierre-Philibert Maubant, and Jacques-Honoré Chastan. The bodies of those executed at Seosomun were commonly abandoned or buried hastily; later Catholic recovery of remains was incomplete, and a distinct burial place for Anna Kim Chang-gŭm is not documented in standard sources.

She was beatified on 5 July 1925 by Pope Pius XI among the group of seventy-nine Korean martyrs whose causes were then completed, and was canonized on 6 May 1984 in Seoul by Pope John Paul II together with the full company of 103 Martyr Saints of Korea. Their collective feast is kept on 20 September. She is venerated as a lay virgin-martyr of the Korean Church. No distinct individual patronages beyond her place among those martyrs are firmly attached to her name in the ordinary directories of saints.

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