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Biography

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Mark Chŏng Ŭi-bae, known in Korean as Jeong Ui-bae and baptized Mark, was a Catholic lay catechist and martyr in nineteenth-century Korea. He was born in 1794 in Seoul, capital of the Joseon kingdom. Educated in the Chinese classical tradition, he later embraced the Catholic faith, which had entered Korea in the late eighteenth century largely through Chinese books and lay networks rather than through a resident clergy. After baptism he served the underground Church as a catechist and community leader (hoejang), instructing converts and helping to hold Christian congregations together during long periods when foreign missionaries were few, hidden, or absent.

Catholicism remained illegal under Joseon law, which treated refusal of ancestral rites as a threat to public order and associated the religion with foreign influence. Severe persecutions had already taken place in 1801, 1839, and 1846. In 1866 a new and extensive campaign, the Byeongin persecution, was launched during the regency of the Heungseon Daewongun. French bishops and priests of the Paris Foreign Missions Society were arrested and put to death, and Korean Catholics were pursued across the country. Chŏng, by then elderly and known as a catechist in the Seoul region, was arrested, interrogated, and urged to renounce his religion. He refused.

He was condemned to death and executed by beheading at Saenamteo, a sandy execution ground on the Han River in Seoul, on 11 March 1866. He was about seventy-two years old. His martyrdom belonged to the same wave of killings that month that claimed Bishop Siméon-François Berneux and other missionaries as well as numerous Korean faithful. Government records and later ecclesiastical investigations preserved his name, approximate age, and the fact of his execution for the faith.

In the twentieth century the Holy See examined the Korean martyrs' causes. Chŏng was beatified by Pope Paul VI on 6 October 1968 with other victims associated with the 1866 persecution, and he was canonized by Pope John Paul II on 6 May 1984 in Seoul, when the pope proclaimed the 103 Martyr Saints of Korea. Their collective memorial is celebrated on 20 September. Surviving sources say little that can be verified about his household or descendants; he is remembered as a learned lay leader who died rather than abandon the Christian faith.

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