John Baptist Yi Kwang-nyŏl

John Baptist Yi Kwang-nyŏl (Korean: 이광렬 요한) was a Korean Catholic layman and martyr of the nineteenth century, numbered among the 103 Korean Martyr Saints. He was born in 1795 in Seoul, in the Joseon kingdom, to a family of the yangban, or noble, class. He was the younger brother of Augustine Yi Kwang-hŏn, who would likewise die a martyr in the same year. Through his elder brother he came to know the Catholic faith, received instruction in Christian doctrine, and was baptized, taking the name John Baptist.

Contemporary accounts preserved in the beatification documentation describe him as quiet, honest, and generous by temperament. After his baptism he led a devout life in the Catholic community of Seoul, which at that time existed under severe legal prohibition. Catholicism had entered Korea in the late eighteenth century largely through lay initiative, and by the early nineteenth century the community had already suffered repeated waves of persecution. Yi Kwang-nyŏl belonged to this underground Church, in which family networks often transmitted the faith from one sibling to another.

In 1839 the Joseon court launched the Gihae persecution, one of the most intense campaigns against Catholics in Korean history. Yi Kwang-nyŏl was arrested and imprisoned. He was subjected to torture intended to force him to renounce his religion, but he refused to apostatize. On 20 July 1839 he was taken to the execution ground at Seosomun, the Small West Gate of Seoul, and beheaded together with other Catholic prisoners. He was forty-five years old. His brother Augustine had been put to death at the same site some two months earlier, on 24 May 1839.

John Baptist Yi Kwang-nyŏl was beatified on 5 July 1925 by Pope Pius XI among a group of seventy-nine Korean martyrs of 1839 and 1846. He was canonized on 6 May 1984 by Pope John Paul II in Seoul, together with the full company of 103 Korean Martyrs, during the pope’s apostolic visit to Korea. The Church commemorates him with his companions on 20 September, the feast of Saints Andrew Kim Taegon, Paul Chong Hasang, and the Korean Martyrs. Surviving biographical detail about his private life remains limited, as is typical for many of the Korean lay martyrs whose lives were recorded chiefly in the context of their arrest, interrogation, and death.