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Biography

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Anna Pak Agi was born in 1783 in Seoul, capital of the Joseon kingdom on the Korean peninsula, into a family that already belonged to the Catholic Church. Korean Catholicism in the late eighteenth century was unusual in having begun largely through the initiative of Confucian scholars who encountered Christian books from China, and for decades the community survived with only intermittent priestly ministry. She received the baptismal name Anna. As a young woman she married a husband who was not a Christian. Surviving notices of her life, drawn from the processes for beatification and from Korean Church tradition, portray her as poorly educated and as someone who struggled to learn the catechism by heart, yet as steadfast in the practices of prayer, fasting, and attendance at the clandestine liturgies of the community when a priest was present.

Throughout her adult life the Joseon state regarded Catholicism as a prohibited teaching. Officials associated it with the refusal of ancestral rites, with potential disloyalty, and with contact with foreigners. Persecutions had already broken out in 1801 and at other moments; many Catholics recanted under pressure, while others went into hiding or died. Anna remained a Catholic through these years. Writers of her acta underline that her faith was simple rather than learned: she is said to have answered questions about doctrine imperfectly, but to have refused to deny Christ or to perform the rites required as a sign of apostasy.

In 1839 the Gihae persecution unfolded in Seoul and the provinces. Anna was arrested and imprisoned with other Catholic women. Under interrogation she was ordered to renounce her religion. The judicial torture of the period typically included beating with sticks and other corporal punishments intended to force a recantation. The records state that she did not apostatize. On 24 May 1839 she was taken to the execution ground in Seoul associated with Seosomun, the West Small Gate, and was beheaded. She was in her mid-fifties. A number of other lay Catholics, men and women, were put to death in the same campaign, which forms one of the principal clusters of the Korean martyrdoms of the nineteenth century.

After the opening of Korea and the re-establishment of a public Catholic hierarchy, the causes of the martyrs were introduced in Rome. Anna Pak Agi was beatified by Pope Pius XI on 5 July 1925 as one of seventy-nine martyrs of Korea. On 6 May 1984, during a pastoral visit to the Republic of Korea, Pope John Paul II canonized her together with Saint Andrew Kim Taegon, Saint Paul Chong Hasang, and one hundred companions. The group is commemorated in the general Roman calendar on 20 September. She is honored as a lay martyr of the Korean Church. No religious order is recorded for her, and no distinct list of patronages attached to her name alone is firmly established in the standard hagiographical sources.

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