Joseph Im Ch'i-p'ek

Joseph Im Ch'i-p'ek (Korean: 임치백 요셉; also romanized Im Chi-baek or Im Ji-baek) was a nineteenth-century Korean Catholic layman and martyr of the Joseon dynasty. He was born in 1804 in Hongju, in Chungcheong Province (corresponding to present-day Hongseong in South Chungcheong, South Korea), during the reign of King Sunjo. Korean Catholicism had taken root only a generation earlier, when Confucian scholars obtained Christian books in Beijing, baptized one another, and formed a church that for years had no resident clergy. The Joseon state treated the new religion as a heterodox threat to ancestral rites and royal authority. The Sinyu persecution of 1801, which occurred when Joseph Im was an infant, had already shown how far the government would go to suppress the faith.

He grew up and lived as a Catholic under continuing legal prohibition. A further great outbreak, the Gihae persecution of 1839, took the lives of Laurent-Joseph-Marius Imbert, the first vicar apostolic of Korea, two other French priests of the Paris Foreign Missions Society, and many Korean laity and catechists, among them Paul Chong Hasang. Joseph Im, then in his thirties, survived that wave. Surviving notices describe him as a married layman connected with the Catholic community in and around the capital. Like other Korean believers of the period he would have practiced the faith in secret household gatherings, received the sacraments only when a missionary priest succeeded in entering the country, and relied on catechists for instruction.

In 1845–1846 Korea’s first native priest, Andrew Kim Taegon, returned from ordination abroad and began a short clandestine ministry. His capture, together with official alarm over foreign shipping and over appeals for outside protection, led to the Byeong-o persecution of 1846. Joseph Im Ch'i-p'ek was arrested in that crackdown. After interrogation and torture aimed at forcing apostasy, he was condemned and executed by strangulation in Seoul on 20 September 1846, at about forty-two years of age. Several other Catholics were put to death in the same weeks at execution grounds outside the city walls, including Saenamteo and Seosomun.

Few personal anecdotes about Joseph Im have been preserved in Western-language sources; his life is known mainly from the summary accounts gathered for the Korean martyrs’ cause. The martyrs of 1839 and 1846, seventy-nine in number, were beatified by Pope Pius XI on 5 July 1925. On 6 May 1984 Pope John Paul II canonized them in Seoul together with twenty-four victims of the 1866 persecution, forming the group of 103 Korean Martyrs. Their collective feast is kept on 20 September. Joseph Im is venerated as a lay witness in a church that had been built and long sustained by the laity under extreme legal and social pressure.