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Biography

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Lucia Kim Nusia was a Korean Catholic laywoman and martyr of the Joseon persecutions of the nineteenth century. She was born in 1815 in Korea into a family that had accepted the Catholic faith, which had entered the peninsula in the late eighteenth century through books and lay networks and was practiced largely in secret. Catholicism was illegal under Joseon law, which treated it as a heterodox teaching incompatible with Confucian ritual, ancestral rites, and loyalty to the throne. Surviving notices of her early life are brief, as is typical for many of the lay victims later raised to the altars; they indicate that she was raised as a Christian, remained unmarried, and is remembered in the Korean Church as a virgin who devoted herself to prayer and to the support of fellow believers.

During her lifetime the Church in Korea endured repeated waves of state violence, including the Sinyu persecution of 1801. The decisive crisis of her own life was the Gihae persecution of 1839, launched during the reign of King Heonjong under the regency of the queen dowager. Officials sought to extirpate Catholic communities by arrest, torture, and public execution. Lucia was seized in the course of this campaign, taken to Seoul, imprisoned, and interrogated. The usual aims of such proceedings were forced apostasy—often by compelling the victim to trample a crucifix or to perform forbidden rites—and the betrayal of other Catholics. Contemporary and later hagiographical summaries agree that she refused to recant.

On 26 September 1839 she was executed by beheading in Seoul, at about twenty-four years of age, together with a group of other Catholic women who had likewise remained steadfast. That day’s victims are commonly listed as including Magdalena Kim Ob-i, Agatha Kim A-gi, Anna Kim Chang-geum, Barbara Han A-gi, Maria Han I-il, Martha Kim Seong-im, Teresa Kim Im-i, and Elisabeth Jeong Jeong-hye, among others associated with the same round of executions. Many of the 1839 beheadings took place at the Small West Gate (Seosomun) of the capital. Her death belonged to a larger sequence of killings that year which also claimed Bishop Laurent Imbert and the French missionaries Pierre Maubant and Jacques Chastan, as well as numerous Korean laypeople and catechists. Precise details of her burial are not securely recorded; bodies of the executed were often abandoned or interred hastily, and later recovery of relics was uneven.

Lucia Kim Nusia was among the seventy-nine martyrs of the 1839 and 1846 persecutions beatified by Pope Pius XI on 5 July 1925. She was canonized in Seoul on 6 May 1984 by Pope John Paul II together with 102 other Korean martyrs, forming the group known as the Holy Korean Martyrs, whose collective liturgical feast is kept on 20 September. Individual biographical material beyond her name, lay and virginal status, approximate age, and the circumstances of her arrest and execution remains sparse; the Church’s case for her sanctity rests on the documented fact of her death for the faith during the Gihae persecution rather than on an extensive personal dossier.

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