Mary Pak K'ŭn-agi

Mary Pak K'ŭn-agi (Korean: Pak K'ŭn-agi Maria; also listed in hagiographical sources as Maria Pak Kun-agi or Maria Park Keun-agi) was a Catholic laywoman of the Joseon kingdom and one of the 103 Korean Martyrs. She was born in 1786 in Seoul, then known as Hanyang. Catholicism had reached Korea only two years earlier, when Yi Sŭng-hun returned from Beijing after baptism and helped form the first community of believers, initially without a resident priest. The new faith spread through Chinese Catholic books and household instruction among both yangban scholars and commoners, but it soon collided with the Confucian state's insistence on ancestral rites and with official suspicion of a teaching associated with foreign powers. Periodic suppressions followed, including the severe Sinyu persecution of 1801. Pak K'ŭn-agi grew up in this setting of clandestine practice and recurring danger.

She married and lived as a lay Catholic in or near the capital. Surviving notices identify her as a married woman; at her death she was about fifty-three years of age. Like other Korean Catholics of the early nineteenth century she would have received the sacraments only rarely, when a Chinese priest or, later, a missionary of the Paris Foreign Missions Society could enter the country in secret, and would have depended on catechists and domestic gatherings for prayer and doctrine. The Church in Korea at that period was still largely a church of lay leaders.

In 1839, during the Kihae persecution under the regency of the queen dowager in the reign of the child king Hŏnjong, the government intensified the hunt for Catholics in Seoul and the provinces. French missionaries, Korean clergy, catechists, and ordinary believers were sought out. Pak K'ŭn-agi was arrested in Seoul, imprisoned, and tortured in an effort to force recantation and to obtain the names of fellow Catholics. She refused to apostatize. On 3 September 1839 she was taken to the execution ground outside the Small West Gate (Sŏsomun) of Seoul and beheaded. She died in the same wave of executions that claimed many other lay Catholics that summer and autumn.

Bodies of those killed at Sŏsomun were commonly abandoned or buried without record; Catholic survivors later recovered relics where they could. Pak K'ŭn-agi was among the seventy-nine Korean martyrs beatified by Pope Pius XI on 5 July 1925. On 6 May 1984, during an apostolic visit to Korea, Pope John Paul II canonized her together with 102 companions at a Mass in Seoul. The group is commemorated on 20 September. Individual documentary traces of her life remain limited, as is typical for many laywomen of the nineteenth-century Korean persecutions; the facts preserved by the Church are her birth in Seoul in 1786, her married state, her refusal to deny the faith under torture, and her beheading at Sŏsomun on 3 September 1839.