Anthony Kim Sŏng-u

Anthony Kim Sŏng-u (Korean: Kim Sŏng-u; baptismal name Anthony, also rendered Antonius) was a Catholic lay catechist and martyr in Joseon-dynasty Korea. He was born in 1795 in Kyŏnggi Province. The Catholic Church in Korea had taken root only about a decade before his birth, after Korean lay scholars obtained baptism in Beijing and returned with Christian books. Throughout his life the Joseon state regarded Catholicism as a heterodox teaching that rejected ancestral rites and therefore threatened the Confucian moral and political order. Major persecutions had already occurred in 1791 and 1801; further waves would follow in 1839, 1846, and 1866. Kim belonged to the second generation of Korean Catholics who kept the faith under those conditions, often without resident clergy.

He was a married layman, not a priest or a member of a religious order. In the Korean Church of the early nineteenth century, married catechists played a central role: they taught doctrine, prepared candidates for baptism, led Sunday prayer when no priest was present, and offered their homes as clandestine chapels. Traditional martyrologies describe Kim Sŏng-u as one of these catechists and state that he placed his house at the disposal of the Catholic community so that believers could gather for instruction and, when a missionary priest could reach them, for Mass and the sacraments. Such household churches were a characteristic institution of Korean Catholicism before religious liberty.

The Gihae persecution, which began in 1839, struck bishops, priests, and a large number of lay people. Kim Sŏng-u was arrested in the course of this campaign or its immediate sequel and was taken to Seoul. There he was interrogated and tortured in an effort to make him renounce Christianity. He refused to apostasize. He died in prison in Seoul on 29 April 1841, about forty-six years old. Surviving notices attribute his death to the effects of imprisonment and torture; some hagiographical summaries specify strangulation in confinement, a method occasionally used on Catholic prisoners in Joseon jails. He is one of the many lay martyrs who form the majority of those later raised to the altars from this period.

On 5 July 1925 Pope Pius XI beatified a group of seventy-nine Korean martyrs that included Kim Sŏng-u. On 6 May 1984, during an apostolic visit to Korea, Pope John Paul II canonized one hundred and three Korean martyrs, among them Anthony Kim Sŏng-u, in a ceremony in Seoul. Their common liturgical feast is 20 September. Beyond his place in that collective cult, few independent biographical documents survive: his wife’s name, whether he had children, and the site of his burial are not securely recorded in the sources commonly cited for the Korean martyrs. He is remembered principally as a lay catechist who maintained a house church and who died in prison rather than deny the faith.