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Biography

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Magdalene Son So-byok (Korean: 손소벽 막달레나; also transcribed Son Sobyŏk Magdalene) was a nineteenth-century Korean Catholic laywoman numbered among the 103 Korean Martyr Saints. She was born in 1801 in Joseon Korea. By that date the Catholic Church in Korea, which had begun in the 1780s when Korean envoys brought Christian books back from Beijing, existed as an indigenous community of laity and catechists, often without resident priests. Converts received baptismal names from the Roman martyrology; Magdalene was a name frequently given to Korean Catholic women. Almost nothing is recorded of her childhood, social rank, or precise place of birth. What later notices preserve is that she belonged to the clandestine Catholic community and that she was a married woman at the time of her arrest.

Catholicism remained a prohibited religion in Joseon. The state regarded refusal of ancestral rites as a threat to Confucian order and to dynastic loyalty. Periods of relative quiet alternated with severe persecutions. In 1839 the Gihae persecution began under the regency of Queen Sunwon during the reign of the young King Heonjong. French missionaries of the Paris Foreign Missions Society who had entered Korea in the mid-1830s were hunted, and Korean Catholics were pressed to recant. Magdalene Son was taken into custody as a Christian. Contemporary and near-contemporary Catholic reports, later used in the beatification process, indicate that she would not apostatize. Like other prisoners of the same campaign she was subjected to interrogation and torture intended to force a denial of the faith.

She was put to death in Seoul on 31 January 1840, at about thirty-nine years of age. Executions of Catholics in the capital during this persecution commonly took place at the Seosomun execution ground outside the Small West Gate. The precise manner of her death is given in standard lists as martyrdom by execution; many companions of 1839–1840 were beheaded. Individual biographical particulars—her husband’s name, the possible existence of children, and the exact circumstances of her arrest—are not firmly established in the published summaries of the 103 martyrs, which for numerous lay victims record little more than name, status, year of birth, and date and place of death.

Magdalene Son was included among the seventy-nine Korean martyrs beatified by Pope Pius XI on 5 July 1925. On 6 May 1984 Pope John Paul II canonized her, together with Saint Andrew Kim Taegon, Saint Paul Chong Hasang, and their companions, at a Mass in Seoul, forming the group known as the 103 Korean Martyr Saints. Their feast is kept on 20 September in the General Roman Calendar. She is venerated as a martyr of the Korean Church; no separate, well-documented individual patronages are customarily attached to her name apart from the collective memory of the Korean martyrs.

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