Magdalene Yi Yŏng-hŭi

Magdalene Yi Yŏng-hŭi was a Korean Catholic laywoman and martyr of the nineteenth century. She was born in 1809 in Seoul, the capital of the Joseon Kingdom. Catholicism had taken root in Korea in the late eighteenth century through Korean scholars who encountered Catholic books in China and through subsequent baptisms, forming a community that for decades existed with almost no ordained clergy. The Joseon government regarded the new religion as subversive because Catholics rejected the state-mandated ancestral rites and professed loyalty to a foreign spiritual authority. Periodic persecutions followed, of which the Gihae persecution of 1839 was among the most severe.

Little is recorded of Magdalene’s private life beyond her identity as a member of the Catholic community in Seoul. Instruction in the faith was typically given by lay catechists, and believers gathered in private houses. When the persecution intensified in 1839, authorities arrested Catholics throughout the capital and the provinces, subjecting them to interrogation, beating, and other tortures designed to compel them to recant and to reveal the names of fellow believers. Magdalene was among those imprisoned. Contemporary accounts of the Korean martyrs emphasize that many of the women, like the men, refused to apostatize despite the prospect of death.

On 20 July 1839 Magdalene Yi Yŏng-hŭi was executed by beheading at the grounds outside Seosomun, the West Small Gate of Seoul. She was put to death together with a number of other Catholic women who had likewise remained steadfast. The Gihae persecution that year also claimed the lives of Korean lay leaders and of French missionaries of the Paris Foreign Missions Society who had entered the country in disguise. The bodies of those killed at Seosomun were customarily abandoned or buried nearby; later generations of Korean Catholics recovered relics and established shrines in memory of the martyrs.

The Church formally recognized Magdalene’s martyrdom in the twentieth century. Pope Pius XI beatified her on 5 July 1925 as one of seventy-nine Korean martyrs. On 6 May 1984 Pope John Paul II canonized her in Seoul, together with one hundred and two companions, during the first papal visit to Korea. The 103 Korean Martyr Saints, among whom Magdalene is numbered, are commemorated on 20 September. Their cult is especially strong in Korea, where they are invoked as witnesses to the origins of the Korean Catholic Church.