Martin Luc Huin

Martin-Luc Huin was a French Catholic priest and missionary of the Paris Foreign Missions Society who was martyred in Korea in 1866 and later canonized among the 103 Korean Martyrs. He was born on 20 October 1836 in Guyonvelle, a small commune in the Haute-Marne department of northeastern France. Drawn to the priesthood and to overseas evangelization, he entered the seminary of the Société des Missions Étrangères de Paris, a society of apostolic life whose members were secular priests rather than religious in the canonical sense, dedicated to missions in East and Southeast Asia. He was ordained in the early 1860s and assigned to the clandestine Korean mission, where the Catholic Church had existed under intermittent and often severe persecution since the late eighteenth century.

Huin reached Korea in 1865 and joined the small group of French bishops and priests then ministering in secret to Korean Catholics. The Korean Church of that period was still in large part a lay-led community that had begun in the 1780s through books and the initiative of Korean Confucian scholars; French missionaries of the Paris Foreign Missions Society had been present since the 1830s. His time in the country was brief. In early 1866 the Heungseon Daewongun, regent for the young King Gojong, launched a nationwide campaign against Catholics known as the Byeongin persecution. Foreign missionaries were particular targets. Bishop Siméon-François Berneux and several priests were arrested in the capital region and put to death in March. Bishop Antoine Daveluy was also seized, together with Fathers Pierre Aumaître and Martin-Luc Huin.

After interrogation, during which the missionaries refused to renounce their faith or to betray Korean Catholics, they were condemned to death. On 30 March 1866 Huin was beheaded at Galmaemot, a coastal execution site in Chungcheong Province, together with Bishop Daveluy, Father Aumaître, and Korean companions. He was twenty-nine years old and had spent only about a year in Korea. The persecution of 1866 was among the bloodiest in Korean Christian history, claiming thousands of lives among the Korean faithful as well as the French clergy.

Huin was beatified on 6 October 1968 by Pope Paul VI with other martyrs of the 1866 persecution, and he was canonized on 6 May 1984 by Pope John Paul II in Seoul, together with 102 other Korean martyrs of the nineteenth century. The group is commemorated in the Roman Martyrology and in the liturgical calendar of the Catholic Church on 20 September. Their memory remains central to the Catholic Church in Korea, which honors them as witnesses to the faith in a period when Christianity was legally prohibited and harshly suppressed.