Louis Beaulieu

Louis Beaulieu was born on 8 October 1840 in Langon, in the Gironde department of southwestern France, in the Bordeaux region. Raised in the Catholic faith, he pursued studies for the priesthood and felt a vocation to the foreign missions. He entered the seminary of the Paris Foreign Missions Society (Société des Missions Étrangères de Paris), a society of apostolic life of secular priests dedicated to evangelization in East and Southeast Asia. After theological formation in Paris he was ordained a priest in 1864 and was assigned to the Vicariate Apostolic of Korea, a mission entrusted to that society and carried on in secrecy because the Joseon state forbade Christianity and punished its practice with death.

He left France for the Far East and, after the long sea voyage customary for mid-nineteenth-century missionaries, reached Korea in 1865. There he placed himself under Bishop Siméon-François Berneux, the vicar apostolic, and began to share in the clandestine pastoral care of Korean Catholics. The Korean Church had been founded largely by laypeople in the late eighteenth century and had already suffered major persecutions, notably in 1801 and 1839, in which earlier French missionaries including Pierre Maubant, Jacques Chastan, and Bishop Laurent Imbert had been put to death. Beaulieu’s own ministry lasted only a short time. In early 1866 the regent Heungseon Daewongun, governing for the young King Gojong, launched the Byeongin persecution, a nationwide campaign against Catholics driven by Confucian hostility to the new religion, fear of foreign influence, and recent contacts with Western vessels.

Bishop Berneux was arrested in Seoul in February 1866. The recently arrived priests, including Beaulieu, were hunted down, imprisoned, and interrogated. Pressed to renounce the faith, they refused. On 8 March 1866 Louis Beaulieu was taken to Saenamteo, an execution ground on the Han River in Seoul, and beheaded. He died together with Bishop Berneux and two other young priests of the Paris Foreign Missions Society, Simon-Marie-Just Ranfer de Bretenières and Pierre-Henri Dorie. Beaulieu was twenty-five years old and had spent less than a year in Korea. In the following weeks Bishop Antoine Daveluy and further missionaries, as well as thousands of Korean lay faithful, were also executed. The persecution of 1866 was among the most severe in Korean Christian history.

The Catholic Church later recognized Beaulieu’s death as martyrdom. Pope Paul VI beatified him on 6 October 1968 among a group of martyrs of Korea. Pope John Paul II canonized him on 6 May 1984 in Seoul, during an apostolic visit to South Korea, as one of the 103 Korean Martyrs, formally commemorated as Saints Andrew Kim Taegon, Paul Chong Hasang, and Companions. Their feast is kept on 20 September in the General Roman Calendar. Louis Beaulieu is venerated as a saint and missionary martyr, especially by the Paris Foreign Missions Society and by the Catholic Church in Korea.