Paul Hong Yŏng-ju

Paul Hong Yŏng-ju was a nineteenth-century Korean Catholic lay catechist and martyr. He was born in 1801 in Seoul, capital of the Kingdom of Joseon. He came from a yangban family that had converted to Catholicism, a faith that had entered Korea in the late eighteenth century through Chinese Christian literature and was later supported by a small number of missionary priests. Because Catholicism rejected participation in Confucian ancestral rites, the Joseon state treated it as a criminal heterodoxy. Paul was the younger brother of Peter Hong Pyŏng-ju; both men served the underground Church as hoejang, lay community leaders and catechists who taught doctrine, prepared converts, and held communities together when ordained clergy were few or absent.

Korean Catholics in this period lived under the constant possibility of denunciation. The Gihae persecution, launched in 1839 during the reign of King Heonjong, was one of the most severe anti-Christian campaigns of the dynasty. Government edicts called for the arrest of believers, the confiscation of religious books and objects, and the use of torture to compel apostasy. Paul Hong Yŏng-ju and his brother were arrested because of their prominence as catechists. They were imprisoned in Seoul and interrogated. Accounts gathered for later beatification state that they refused to recant or to betray fellow Catholics.

Paul Hong Yŏng-ju died in prison in Seoul in 1840, at about thirty-nine years of age. Surviving notices give the date as 31 January or 1 February 1840. Death resulted from strangulation or from the cumulative effects of torture and confinement, both of which were routinely employed against Christians in the Gihae persecution. His brother Peter perished in the same series of prison deaths. Their martyrdom forms part of the larger group of Korean Catholics killed in 1839–1840, which included clergy, nobles, and commoners, men and women.

The Holy See recognized Paul Hong Yŏng-ju among 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 him together with twenty-four further martyrs of the 1866 persecution, creating the group of 103 Korean Martyrs known liturgically as Saint Andrew Kim Taegon, Saint Paul Chong Hasang, and Companions. The Catholic Church keeps their collective feast on 20 September. Details of Paul Hong Yŏng-ju’s family life, including marriage or children, are not clearly established in the available historical record; he is remembered as a lay leader who died rather than abandon the Christian faith. He is venerated especially in Korea as one of the companions of the Korean martyrs.