Paul Chong Hasang

Paul Chong Hasang (Korean: Jeong Ha-sang; baptized Paulo) was a Korean Catholic lay leader and martyr of the early nineteenth century. He was born in 1795 into a yangban family that had already entered the Catholic Church in the first generation of Korean Christianity. That Church was unusual in Catholic history: it had been founded in 1784 by Korean lay scholars who encountered Christian books from China, not by foreign missionaries, and for decades it survived with little or no resident clergy. His father, Augustine Chong Yak-jong (Jeong Yak-jong), was a leading early catechist and the author of the Korean catechetical work Jugyo Yoji (Essentials of the Lord's Teaching). Augustine was executed in 1801 during the Sinyu persecution, when Paul was still a child. Another close relative of the same scholarly Jeong lineage was the celebrated Confucian reformer Jeong Yak-yong (Dasan). After the 1801 killings, Paul and his mother, Cecilia Yu So-sa, lived under the legal and social disabilities that attached to the families of executed Catholics, yet they remained in the Church.

As an adult, Paul became the principal lay organizer of the Korean Catholic community in the generation between the 1801 persecution and the Gihae persecution of 1839. Joseon's isolationist policy treated Catholicism as a heterodox and politically dangerous teaching, and contact with Beijing or with Rome was itself a crime. Paul repeatedly used the cover of Korea's tributary missions to Beijing in order to reach the Catholic authorities there and to plead for priests. He also prepared a written supplication to the Holy See asking that a hierarchy be established for Korea and that bishops and missionaries be sent. Those efforts formed part of the background to Pope Gregory XVI's erection of the Vicariate Apostolic of Korea in 1831 and to the subsequent arrival of French priests of the Paris Foreign Missions Society, among them Bishop Laurent-Marie-Joseph Imbert. Once missionaries were in the country, Paul served as catechist, interpreter of language and custom, and chief Korean assistant to the clergy, instructing converts and helping to hold a clandestine Church together.

In 1839 the Joseon court launched a new nationwide campaign against Catholics. Bishop Imbert and the priests Pierre Maubant and Jacques Chastan gave themselves up in the hope of sparing the faithful; they were executed, and mass arrests followed. Paul Chong Hasang was seized, interrogated, and tortured. Contemporary martyrdom records present him as answering his judges with both doctrinal clarity and political tact, insisting that Catholics could be loyal subjects and that the faith was not a cover for sedition. He was condemned and beheaded at Seoul on 22 September 1839, near the Small West Gate (Seosomun). He was in his mid-forties. In the same persecution his aged mother Cecilia Yu So-sa and his sister Elisabeth Chong Chong-hye were also put to death. Their deaths belong to the larger company of Korean martyrs whose acts were later collected for the Holy See.

Paul was beatified with a group of Korean martyrs by Pope Pius XI on 5 July 1925. He was canonized by Pope John Paul II in Seoul on 6 May 1984, together with Andrew Kim Taegon, the first Korean-born priest, and 101 companions—the 103 Korean Martyrs. The Church keeps their memorial on 20 September. In Korean Catholic memory Paul Chong Hasang stands as the outstanding lay apostle of the Church's second generation: a scholar-catechist who joined the indigenous lay foundation of Korean Christianity to the arrival of a missionary hierarchy, and who sealed that work by martyrdom.