Magdalene Pak Pong-son

Magdalene Pak Pong-son (Korean: 박봉손 막달레나) was a nineteenth-century Korean Catholic laywoman and martyr, counted among the 103 Korean Martyrs of the Catholic Church. She was born in 1811 in Seoul, in the Joseon kingdom, when the Catholic faith—introduced into Korea in the late eighteenth century largely by lay scholars rather than by resident foreign clergy—was still illegal and subject to repeated state persecution. Korean Catholicism in this period was unusual in East Asia for the prominence of lay leadership, because missionary priests could enter the country only rarely and at great personal risk.

Surviving biographical notices of Pak Pong-son are short, as is typical for many of the lay victims of the Gihae persecution. Church records compiled for later beatification describe her as a married woman of the Catholic community in the capital and a believer of firm conviction. In 1839 the Joseon court opened a major campaign against Catholics, known as the Gihae persecution, in the course of which French missionaries and large numbers of Korean converts were arrested, interrogated under torture, and put to death. Magdalene was among those seized in Seoul for refusing to recant Christianity.

She was executed by beheading on 26 September 1839 at the execution ground outside the Small West Gate (Seosomun) in Seoul, a site used for the public killing of many Catholics. She was about twenty-eight years old. Other Korean Catholics, including catechists and fellow laywomen, were put to death in the same autumn wave of executions. Individual details of her husband’s identity, whether she had children, and the later resting place of her remains are not securely recorded in the sources that survive; after Seosomun executions, bodies were often left exposed and later recovered in secret by fellow believers.

Magdalene Pak Pong-son was beatified on 5 July 1925 by Pope Pius XI as one of the seventy-nine Korean martyrs associated with the persecutions of the 1830s and 1840s. She was canonized on 6 May 1984 by Pope John Paul II during an open-air Mass in Seoul, together with Saint Andrew Kim Taegon, Saint Paul Chong Hasang, and one hundred other companions. The Church commemorates these martyrs collectively on 20 September. No distinct personal patronages are customarily attached to her name apart from the group’s general veneration among Korean Catholics.