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Biography

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Joseph Chang Sŏng-jib was a Korean Catholic lay martyr of the nineteenth century. He was born in 1786 in Seoul, capital of the Joseon kingdom. He grew up in a Confucian society in which the Catholic faith, first brought to Korea in 1784 by Korean scholars returning from Beijing, was treated as a heterodox and politically dangerous teaching. As an adult he worked as a pharmacist, preparing and selling traditional herbal medicines, an occupation that placed him among the urban commoner and specialist classes of the capital.

The early Korean Church was almost entirely a lay community. No Korean priest was ordained until 1845, and foreign missionaries entered the country only at great personal risk. Chang Sŏng-jib encountered Catholic teaching through acquaintances, was baptized, and received the Christian name Joseph. After baptism he lived the faith quietly but consistently, taking part in the clandestine life of the Church while continuing his trade. Contemporary notices remember him for the sincerity of his conversion, which occurred when he was already of mature years.

In 1839 the Gihae persecution broke out under the regency government. Catholics were hunted as followers of an “evil doctrine” that rejected ancestral rites and the ritual foundations of the state. Chang Sŏng-jib was arrested in Seoul, imprisoned, and interrogated. Officials pressed him to apostatize, including by trampling a crucifix or otherwise denying the faith. He refused. Subjected to torture and the brutal conditions of Joseon prisons, he weakened and died in custody on 26 May 1839 without recanting.

The Catholic Church judged his death to be martyrdom in odium fidei. He was among the seventy-nine Korean martyrs of the 1839 and 1846 persecutions beatified by Pope Pius XI on 5 July 1925. On 6 May 1984 Pope John Paul II canonized him together with 102 companions in a ceremony held in Seoul, creating the group known as the 103 Korean Martyrs. Their liturgical commemoration is 20 September. Joseph Chang Sŏng-jib is remembered as one of the many lay men and women who formed the backbone of the early Korean Church and who chose death rather than abandonment of the faith.

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