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Biography

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Peter Cho Hwa-sŏ (Korean: 조화서 베드로) was a Catholic layman of nineteenth-century Korea and one of the 103 Martyrs of Korea. He was born in 1815 in the Joseon kingdom, in a period when the Catholic faith was still illegal. Korean Catholicism had begun in 1784 when lay scholars baptized one another after studying Christian books obtained in Beijing; it grew for decades with almost no resident clergy and was met by repeated official persecutions, notably in 1801, 1839, and 1846. Cho Hwa-sŏ lived his adult life inside this underground church, whose members gathered in secret, transmitted doctrine through family and village networks, and depended on rare visits by missionary priests.

The last and bloodiest of the major nineteenth-century persecutions, the Byeongin Persecution, broke out in 1866 under the regent Heungseon Daewongun. French missionaries were executed and Korean Catholics were hunted across the provinces. Peter Cho Hwa-sŏ was arrested in the course of that campaign. Interrogated and pressed to recant, he refused. He was put to death in 1866, at about fifty-one years of age. The notices later used in the Roman beatification and canonization processes preserve his name and the fact of his martyrdom, but they do not yield a full independent biography.

He was beatified by Pope Paul VI on 6 October 1968 with other martyrs associated with the 1866 persecution, and he was canonized by Pope John Paul II on 6 May 1984 in Seoul, together with Andrew Kim Taegon, Paul Chong Hasang, and ninety-nine companions. The 103 Martyrs of Korea are commemorated on 20 September. They are honored collectively as witnesses to a church that was, unusually, founded and long sustained by the laity, and that endured successive waves of state violence.

Beyond the years of his birth and death and the fact of his martyrdom, little that is specific to Peter Cho Hwa-sŏ can be verified from widely available historical sources. A precise birth village, the name of any spouse, the existence of children, the exact place of execution, and a burial site are not securely established in those sources. His memory is therefore kept chiefly within the collective cult of the Korean martyrs rather than through an extensive individual legend.

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