Peter Ch'oe Ch'ang-hŭb

Peter Ch'oe Ch'ang-hŭb (Korean: 최창흡), known in the Church by his baptismal name Peter, was a Catholic layman of the Joseon kingdom and one of the 103 Korean Martyrs canonized in 1984. He was born in 1786. Korean Catholicism originated in the 1780s among scholars who studied Christian books obtained from China and formed a community before any foreign priest had entered the country. By the early nineteenth century the Church existed as a clandestine network of households, catechists, and occasional visiting clergy, and it was repeatedly targeted by the state as an illegal teaching contrary to Confucian ritual and political loyalty. Ch'oe belonged to this second generation of Korean Catholics who kept the faith under the threat of arrest, torture, and death.

Reliable biographical particulars about his family, occupation, and exact place of birth are scarce. Like many of the Korean lay martyrs, he is known primarily through the fact of his baptism, his persistence in the Church, and the circumstances of his death as recorded in later martyrologies and in the tradition of the Korean Catholic community. The Gihae persecution of 1839, launched during the reign of King Heonjong under the regency of Queen Sunwon, was among the most systematic attempts to eradicate Catholicism in Joseon. Believers were denounced, imprisoned, and pressed to renounce their religion; those who refused were commonly tortured and finally executed.

Peter Ch'oe Ch'ang-hŭb was arrested in that persecution and would not apostatize. He was beheaded in Seoul on 12 September 1839, when he was about fifty-three years old. Contemporary and later Catholic sources associate many of the September 1839 executions with the grounds outside Seosomun, the Small West Gate of the capital, which became one of the principal martyrdom sites of the Korean Church. His death took place in the same month in which a number of other Korean Catholics, including prominent lay leaders of the Gihae persecution, were also put to death.

The Korean Catholic community preserved the names of those who had died for the faith. Peter Ch'oe Ch'ang-hŭb was included among the seventy-nine 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 Andrew Kim Taegon, Paul Chong Hasang, and 101 companions, among them Peter Ch'oe Ch'ang-hŭb, in a ceremony held in Seoul—the first canonization performed outside Rome. The 103 Korean Martyrs are commemorated jointly on 20 September in the liturgical calendar of the Catholic Church. While the documentary record does not support a detailed personal portrait, his place among the canonized martyrs rests on the Church's judgment that he died rather than deny the faith.