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Biography

Short Description

Joseph Han Wŏn-sŏ is a Korean Catholic whose name combines the baptismal name Joseph with a Korean personal name given in McCune-Reischauer romanization. Catholicism reached Korea in the late eighteenth century through Korean scholars who encountered Christian books obtained on diplomatic missions to Beijing. Unlike the pattern in many other regions, the Korean Church began as a largely lay-led community before the first foreign priest arrived in 1794 and well before the first Korean was ordained to the priesthood in the mid-nineteenth century.

Throughout the nineteenth century the Joseon state launched repeated campaigns against Catholics. Church teaching on God, the afterlife, and the illicit character of certain ancestral rites was judged incompatible with neo-Confucian ideology and royal authority. Documented waves of persecution in 1801, 1839, 1846, and 1866 produced large numbers of martyrs drawn from every social rank, including women, children, members of the nobility, and commoners. Later church historians gathered government interrogation records, missionary reports, and survivor testimonies in order to identify those who had died for the faith.

In 1984 Pope John Paul II canonized 103 Korean martyrs during a Mass in Seoul; their collective feast is kept on 20 September. In 2014 Pope Francis beatified a further 124 Korean martyrs. Whether Joseph Han Wŏn-sŏ belongs to either of these groups, or to the still larger number of Korean Catholics who suffered without later receiving public ecclesiastical honors, cannot be established from the general historical sources available for verification here.

No reliable, independently confirmed year of birth, year of death, place of birth or death, marital status, religious-order affiliation, or specific circumstances of life for Joseph Han Wŏn-sŏ has been located in standard accessible accounts. He did not serve as Bishop of Rome or as patriarch of an Eastern church. Any further biographical detail, if it exists, would most likely be found in specialized Korean martyrologies, diocesan archives in Korea, or the records of the Paris Foreign Missions Society.

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