Magdalene Hŏ Kye-im

Magdalene Hŏ Kye-im (Korean: 허계임 막달레나; also spelled Ho Kye-im or Heo Gye-im) was a Korean Catholic laywoman and martyr of the nineteenth century, numbered among the 103 Korean Martyrs. She was born in 1773 in Joseon Korea, in the decade before Catholicism took organized form in the country. The Korean Church is conventionally dated from 1784, when Yi Seung-hun was baptized in Beijing and returned to baptize others. For years the community grew through lay initiative and Chinese Catholic books, without resident foreign clergy. The faith was illegal under the Confucian state. The Sinyu persecution of 1801 already showed how costly membership could be; Magdalene belonged to the generation that kept household communities alive after that first great trial.

She married and was the mother of Augustine Kim Che-jun (Kim Je-jun), who was himself martyred in 1839 and later canonized with her. In a Church that as yet had no convents and very few priests, Korean Catholic women were often the ones who taught prayers and doctrine in the home, baptized infants in danger, and held families to fasting and Sunday observance when discovery by magistrates or neighbors meant prison. Magdalene is remembered in the tradition of the Korean martyrs as a devout wife and mother who raised her son in that clandestine faith.

In 1839 the Gihae persecution broke out under the regency of Queen Sunwon during the reign of King Heonjong. Catholics were hunted, imprisoned, and pressed to recant, typically by trampling a crucifix or denouncing the Church. Magdalene Hŏ Kye-im was arrested, interrogated, and tortured. She refused to apostatize. On 26 September 1839 she was beheaded in Seoul, at the execution ground associated with the Small West Gate (Seosomun), at about sixty-six years of age. Her son died in the same persecution. Their deaths belonged to the wave of executions that year which the Church later counted among the seventy-nine martyrs of 1839–1846.

Those seventy-nine were beatified by Pope Pius XI on 5 July 1925. On 6 May 1984 Pope John Paul II canonized them together with twenty-four martyrs of the Byeongin persecution of 1866, in a ceremony held in Seoul—the first canonization celebrated outside Rome. The 103 Korean Martyrs are commemorated on 20 September. Magdalene Hŏ Kye-im is venerated as one of the laywomen whose fidelity, lived in family life and sealed by martyrdom, helped establish the Catholic Church in Korea.