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Biography

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Lucia Pak Hui-sun, known in English as Lucy Pak Hui-sun or Park Hee-soon, was a Korean Catholic laywoman and virgin martyr. She was born in 1801 in Seoul, then the capital of the Joseon kingdom. The Catholic faith had been introduced to Korea in 1784 by lay scholars who had encountered it in Beijing, and by the early nineteenth century small communities of believers existed in the capital despite a royal ban. Lucia came from a family of the yangban nobility. Together with her younger sister Maria she chose consecrated virginity rather than marriage, a striking decision in a Confucian society that defined a noblewoman's duty almost entirely through wifehood and the continuation of the family line. She lived a hidden Christian life of prayer, fasting, and charity toward the poor and toward fellow Catholics who practiced their religion in secret.

Joseon officials regarded Catholicism as a heterodox teaching that rejected ancestral rites, challenged royal authority, and carried foreign political implications. Severe persecutions had already occurred, notably the Sinyu persecution of 1801, the year of Lucia's birth. In 1839 the Gihae persecution erupted. French missionaries of the Paris Foreign Missions Society were being sought, and Korean Catholics were arrested in large numbers. Lucia and her sister were seized in Seoul, imprisoned, interrogated, and tortured in an effort to make them apostatize. The acts of the Korean martyrs describe her as steadfast in confession of the faith and as a source of encouragement to other prisoners. In May 1839 she was condemned and beheaded in Seoul at about thirty-eight years of age. Maria was martyred as well.

Lucia is one of the 103 Korean Martyrs honored by the Catholic Church. Seventy-nine martyrs, principally those of 1839 and 1846, were beatified by Pope Pius XI on 5 July 1925. A further twenty-four, mainly victims of the 1866 persecution, were beatified by Pope Paul VI on 6 October 1968. Pope John Paul II canonized all 103 on 6 May 1984 in Seoul, during his apostolic journey to Korea. Their common liturgical feast is 20 September, the memorial of Saint Andrew Kim Taegon, Saint Paul Chong Hasang, and Companions. Lucia is venerated as a virgin martyr. She is not recorded as having married or as having had children, and she belonged to no canonical religious order, for Korean Catholicism in her generation had not yet established convents.

Devotion to the Korean martyrs developed within the Catholic community through the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Shrines in Seoul, including sites associated with executions at the city gates, commemorate those who died in the capital. Lucia's name stands in the official catalogue of the 103 saints. She is invoked with her companions as a witness to a Church founded by laity and tested by repeated persecution. Standard hagiographical sources do not attach distinct individual patronages to her beyond her share in the collective cult of the Korean Martyrs.

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