Marie-Nicolas-Antoine Daveluy

Marie-Nicolas-Antoine Daveluy was a nineteenth-century French Catholic missionary bishop who spent most of his adult life in Korea and died there as a martyr. He was born in 1818 in Amiens, in the Somme region of northern France, and after seminary formation was ordained a priest. He then entered the Paris Foreign Missions Society, a society of apostolic life that trained secular clergy for overseas evangelization. In the 1840s he was sent to East Asia. After language study he entered Korea clandestinely in 1845 with Bishop Jean-Joseph Ferréol and the newly ordained Korean priest Andrew Kim Taegon, at a time when the Joseon state still forbade Christianity and punished its adherents with imprisonment or death.

Once in Korea, Daveluy worked for more than two decades among scattered Catholic communities that had to live in secrecy. He became one of the principal European students of the Korean language in his generation, compiling lexicographical and grammatical materials, preparing catechetical and other religious texts in Korean, and gathering historical notices on earlier persecutions and martyrs. Those writings later served both the mission and subsequent historians of the Korean Church. In the mid-1850s the Holy See named him coadjutor to Bishop Siméon-François Berneux, Apostolic Vicar of Korea. He received episcopal consecration as titular bishop of Acone and thereafter shared the government of a Church that still had no legal standing in the kingdom.

In 1866 the regent Heungseon Daewongun launched a severe anti-Christian campaign later known as the Byeongin persecution. Bishop Berneux and several missionaries were arrested and put to death in March of that year. Daveluy, who then headed the vicariate, was himself seized shortly afterward. After interrogation he was taken to Galmaemot, a coastal locality in Chungcheong Province. There, at the end of March 1866, he was beheaded together with the French missionaries Pierre Aumaître and Martin-Luc Huin and Korean Catholic companions. His execution formed part of a wider slaughter of clergy and laity that marked one of the last great Joseon persecutions of Christians.

The Catholic Church later numbered Daveluy among the martyrs of Korea. He was beatified by Pope Paul VI in 1968 and canonized by Pope John Paul II on 6 May 1984 in Seoul, as one of the one hundred and three Korean Martyrs. Their collective feast is kept on 20 September. He is remembered as a missionary bishop who served under persecution, as a linguist and compiler of Korean Christian texts, and as a witness of the nineteenth-century Korean Church.