Mary Yi In-dŏk

Mary Yi In-dŏk belongs to the generation of Korean Catholics whose lives are known chiefly through the records of the Joseon persecutions and through later ecclesiastical compilations rather than through abundant personal papers. Her name follows the customary form used by Korean Christians of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: a baptismal name drawn from the Western sanctoral cycle—in her case Mary—joined to a Korean surname and given name. Yi was among the most common surnames on the peninsula; In-dŏk is a Sino-Korean given name. Beyond this onomastic identification, widely accessible historical literature does not preserve a securely dated birth, a confirmed native village, or a detailed family genealogy that can be attributed to her without risk of confusion with other women of similar name who also suffered for the faith.

Catholicism entered Korea in the 1780s through Korean Confucian scholars who had obtained Christian books in Beijing and who baptized one another before any European priest had set foot in the country. The first Korean baptized, Yi Sŭng-hun, received the sacrament in Beijing in 1784; communities of believers then formed in Seoul and in the southern provinces, especially among the yangban and among commoners connected to them. Because the new religion rejected the Confucian ancestral rites as superstitious, the Joseon court treated it as a political as well as a doctrinal threat. Royal edicts in 1785, 1791, 1801, 1839, 1846, and 1866 ordered the suppression of the Church. Women were indispensable to the survival of these communities. They memorized prayers and doctrine in a largely oral culture, baptized dying infants, hid priests and catechists, and often proved as steadfast as men under interrogation. Government registers compiled during the great hunts of 1801 and 1839 list hundreds of female names, frequently with ages, places of origin, and brief notes on whether the prisoner recanted.

Those who refused to recant were subjected to repeated beatings, the twisting of limbs, and, in many cases, execution by beheading, strangulation, or, for some of higher status, the granting of poison. The bodies of the executed were often left exposed or buried hastily; only later did surviving Catholics gather relics and record names. French missionaries of the Paris Foreign Missions Society, who entered Korea from the 1830s onward, and Korean lay leaders such as Paul Chŏng Ha-sang collected lists that eventually underpinned the beatification causes. Because multiple women might share a surname and a baptismal name, later hagiography sometimes conflated individuals or preserved only a line or two—age, marital status, and the date of death—drawn from a magistrate’s report. In that documentary landscape, an individual such as Mary Yi In-dŏk cannot be given a full independent biography unless her name is tied to a specific, published acta of martyrdom.

The Catholic Church has recognized Korean martyrs in several groups. Seventy-nine martyrs of the 1839 and 1846 persecutions were beatified by Pope Pius XI in 1925; twenty-four martyrs of 1866 were beatified by Pope Paul VI in 1968; the combined 103 were canonized by Pope John Paul II in Seoul on 6 May 1984 and are commemorated on 20 September. A separate group of 124 martyrs, largely from the persecutions of 1791 and 1801, was beatified by Pope Francis in Seoul on 16 August 2014. Devotion to all of these figures is strong in Korea, at shrines such as Jeoldusan and Saenamteo, and among the Korean diaspora. Whether Mary Yi In-dŏk stands on one of these official lists, and therefore whether she has an assigned feast or a named canonizing or beatifying pope, is not established here from a source that distinguishes her clearly from homonymous companions. What can be said with confidence is that she is remembered in the tradition of Korean Catholic women who kept the faith in a Confucian kingdom that sought to extinguish it, and that any fuller vita would have to rest on the original Korean and missionary documents rather than on conjecture.