Paul Yun Ji-chung

Paul Yun Ji-chung was born in 1759 into a yangban scholar-gentry family in Jinsan, in Jeolla Province of the Joseon kingdom. He received the classical Confucian education expected of his class and belonged to the generation of Korean intellectuals who, in the late eighteenth century, first encountered Catholic teaching through Chinese-language books brought from Beijing, including works of the Jesuit mission such as Matteo Ricci’s Tianzhu Shiyi. At that time Korea had no resident foreign missionaries; the Church there was a lay-initiated community. Yun was baptized with the Christian name Paul and became one of the notable early believers in the Honam region, linked by kinship and study to other pioneering Catholics, among them members of the Kwon family, including his cousin Kwon Sang-yeon (James).

In 1790 Bishop Alexandre de Gouvea, the Portuguese Franciscan apostolic vicar of Beijing who then held jurisdiction over Korea, sent instructions that Catholics must not perform the traditional ancestral rites, which the Church judged to be illicit worship. The order cut against the core of Joseon social ethics, in which jesa ceremonies and spirit tablets expressed filial piety and lineage identity. When Yun’s mother died in 1791, he and Kwon Sang-yeon buried her according to Catholic practice. They refused to set up a spirit tablet and destroyed the ancestral tablets. The act became public and provoked outrage among Confucian elites. Reported to the government of King Jeongjo, the affair is remembered as the Jinsan incident and as the first major collision between the new religion and the Confucian state.

Arrested and examined by the authorities of Jeolla Province, Yun and Kwon refused to recant. Under interrogation Yun defended Catholic teaching on God and the soul and explained why he now rejected rites he regarded as idolatrous. Written statements from the examination survive as important sources for the first generation of Korean Christianity. The two men were condemned for violating fundamental norms of the kingdom. On 8 December 1791 they were beheaded at Jeonju, the provincial capital. Yun was about thirty-two years old. Their execution is generally treated as the first capital punishment inflicted for the Catholic faith in Korea and as the opening of a long period of intermittent but severe persecution.

The deaths of Paul Yun Ji-chung and James Kwon Sang-yeon showed that Catholicism would not be tolerated as a private scholarly interest. Later crackdowns, especially in 1801, 1839, 1846, and 1866, produced hundreds of further martyrs. Yun was not among the 103 Korean Martyrs canonized by Pope John Paul II in 1984, whose causes had been advanced earlier. On 16 August 2014, during an apostolic visit to Korea, Pope Francis beatified Paul Yun Ji-chung and 123 companions at Gwanghwamun Square in Seoul, honoring martyrs from 1791 through the late nineteenth century who had not yet been raised to the altars. They are venerated as blesseds of the Catholic Church.