Cecilia Yu So-sa

Cecilia Yu So-sa was born in 1761 in Korea, during the Joseon dynasty, into a family of the Yu clan. She married Augustine Chong Yak-jong, a member of a prominent scholarly lineage that also included the Confucian thinker Chong Yak-yong, known as Dasan. Her husband became one of the earliest leaders of the Catholic Church in Korea. He wrote Jugyo Yoji (Essentials of the Lord's Teaching), the first catechism composed in the Korean language, and helped organize the community at a time when the Church in Korea had no resident clergy and was sustained by lay believers. Cecilia and Augustine had several children, including Paul Chong Hasang, later a saint and a leading catechist, and Elisabeth Chong Chong-hye, who likewise died a martyr.

In 1801 the Sinyu persecution fell upon Korean Catholics. Augustine Chong Yak-jong was arrested and executed for his faith, leaving Cecilia a widow with young children. The household's property was confiscated and the family was reduced to poverty. Although Catholicism remained legally forbidden, she continued to practice the faith and to raise her children as Catholics. For the following decades she lived as a widow under the constant possibility of further persecution, supporting her family and remaining known among Korean Catholics as the wife of a martyr.

Her son Paul Chong Hasang grew up to serve as a clerk and as a catechist. He sought to obtain bishops and priests for Korea, making journeys in connection with the Church in Beijing and sending petitions toward Rome. Her daughter Elisabeth also persevered in the faith. The family's public association with Catholicism, already sealed by the execution of Augustine in 1801, exposed them again when a new wave of persecution arrived.

The Gihae persecution began in 1839 during the regency of Queen Sunwon. Paul Chong Hasang was arrested and was beheaded in Seoul in September 1839. Cecilia, then nearly eighty years old, was herself arrested, interrogated, and tortured. Catholic sources record that she refused to renounce her religion. Weakened by age and by the punishments inflicted on her, she died in prison in Seoul in November 1839. Her daughter Elisabeth Chong Chong-hye was also martyred in the course of the same persecution.

Cecilia Yu So-sa was beatified by Pope Pius XI on 5 July 1925 among the companions of Andrew Kim Taegon and Paul Chong Hasang, and was canonized by Pope John Paul II on 6 May 1984 in Seoul, together with one hundred and two other Korean martyrs. She is commemorated with them on 20 September. She is remembered as a laywoman, wife, and mother who kept the Catholic faith in her family through two major persecutions in early nineteenth-century Korea.