Columba Kim Hyo-im

Columba Kim Hyo-im was a Korean Catholic laywoman and virgin martyr of the Joseon period, put to death in the Kihae persecution of 1839. She was born in 1814 in the village of Magok in Yanggeun county, in what is now Gyeonggi Province. Her baptismal name Columba (rendered Golumba in Korean) followed the custom of taking a Christian name at baptism. Her mother was a practising Catholic who taught the faith to her daughters; their father was not a Catholic and died while the girls were still young. After his death the household moved to Seoul. Columba was the elder sister of Agnes Kim Hyo-ju, who would later be martyred with her. In a society that expected women of their standing to marry, both sisters chose to remain unmarried and to live as virgins dedicated to God, occupying themselves with prayer, fasting, and assistance to the small and often clandestine Catholic community of the capital.

The Kihae persecution broke out in 1839, during the reign of King Heonjong, when the court intensified its long-standing ban on Catholicism. Catholics in Seoul were sought out, arrested, and subjected to interrogation and torture meant to force apostasy and to extract the names of other believers. Columba was seized together with her sister. Accounts preserved by missionaries of the Paris Foreign Missions Society, and later used in the Church’s official processes, describe her as resolute under torture. She would not recant and would not betray fellow Catholics. After imprisonment and repeated beatings she was condemned to death.

On 26 September 1839 she was beheaded at the Small West Gate (Seosomun) in Seoul, the ordinary place of execution for many of that year’s martyrs. Agnes Kim Hyo-ju was put to death in the same persecution and is commemorated with her. Columba was about twenty-five years old. She belonged to no religious order; she is honoured as a lay virgin martyr of the Korean Church.

She was among the seventy-nine Korean martyrs beatified by Pope Pius XI on 5 July 1925. On 6 May 1984 Pope John Paul II canonized her in Seoul, together with Andrew Kim Taegon, Paul Chong Hasang, and one hundred companions, the group known as the 103 Korean Martyrs. The Catholic Church keeps their common feast on 20 September.