Choi Yeong-i

Barbara Choe Yong-i (also rendered Choi Yeong-i or Ch'oe Yŏng-i), known in the Church by her baptismal name Barbara, was a Korean Catholic laywoman and martyr of the nineteenth century. She was born in 1819 in Joseon Korea, in a period when the Catholic faith, introduced to the peninsula in the late eighteenth century by lay scholars who had encountered Christian books from China, remained illegal and subject to repeated state persecution. The early Korean Church was unusual in having been founded largely by laity rather than foreign missionaries; small communities of believers practiced in secret, often at great personal risk. Barbara belonged to this clandestine Catholic milieu and received baptism as a member of it.

As a young woman she married a fellow Catholic. Documentary traces of her personal life are limited, as is typical for many of the lay martyrs whose stories survive mainly through later hagiographical compilations, survivor testimony, and fragments of Joseon interrogation records rather than extensive contemporary biographies. In 1839 the Gihae persecution broke out, one of the major waves of anti-Christian violence in nineteenth-century Korea, intensified after French missionaries of the Paris Foreign Missions Society had entered the country. Numerous Catholics were arrested, tortured in an effort to force apostasy and the betrayal of other believers, and put to death. Barbara was among those seized in this campaign.

She refused to recant. In 1840, at about twenty-one years of age, she was executed by beheading in Seoul, the capital, where many Korean Catholics of that generation were put to death at public execution grounds. She is counted among the martyrs of the 1839–1840 persecutions. Seventy-nine Korean martyrs of this era, including Barbara, were beatified by Pope Pius XI on 5 July 1925. A further group from later persecutions was beatified in 1968. All 103 were canonized together by Pope John Paul II on 6 May 1984 in Seoul, during the first papal visit to Korea. They are commemorated jointly on 20 September.

The 103 Korean Martyrs as a group have come to represent the endurance of a Church that grew under prohibition and produced a high proportion of lay saints, including many women and married people. Individual details of Barbara Choe Yong-i’s family, exact birthplace, and the precise circumstances of her interrogation are not richly attested in readily verifiable historical sources; what is firmly established is her identity as a young married Catholic woman of Joseon Korea who died for her faith in 1840 and was raised to the altars with her companions in the twentieth century.