Peter Ch'oe Hyŏng

Peter Ch'oe Hyŏng (Korean: 최형), known in the Church by his baptismal name Peter, was a nineteenth-century Korean Catholic layman and catechist who died as a martyr during the Byeongin persecution of 1866. He was born in 1814 in Seoul, in the Joseon kingdom. Surviving notices of his life are brief, as is typical of many of the Korean martyrs whose cases rest on missionary reports, government interrogation records, and later diocesan inquiries rather than on full contemporary biographies. He belonged to the small Catholic community that had taken root in Korea from the late eighteenth century, a Church first organized largely by lay scholars and household networks after Yi Sŭng-hun’s baptism in Beijing in 1784, and only later served by a handful of foreign priests of the Paris Foreign Missions Society.

As an adult he served as a catechist (a lay community leader, often called hoejang in Korean Catholic usage). In Joseon Korea that office carried unusual weight. Ordained clergy were few, frequently in hiding, and at times entirely absent, so catechists instructed converts, held communities together, and helped preserve doctrine and books under the threat of arrest. Possession of Christian writings and refusal to perform state-sponsored ancestral rites were treated as crimes against Confucian order and, by the mid-nineteenth century, as signs of illicit connection with foreign powers. Individual anecdotes about Ch'oe’s family life, education, and daily work are poorly documented in the sources commonly available; he is remembered in the martyrology as a lay catechist of the Seoul Catholic community rather than as a member of a religious order or as a cleric.

In 1866 the regent Hŭngsŏn Taewŏn’gun launched a nationwide campaign against Catholics, the Byeongin persecution, amid fear of French and other Western intervention and long-standing official hostility to the new religion. Thousands of Korean believers were killed that year, far more than the number later raised to the altars. Foreign bishops and priests were executed, and Korean catechists and householders were hunted as organizers of the forbidden Church. Peter Ch'oe Hyŏng was arrested in the course of this persecution, interrogated, and put to death in Seoul in December 1866. Traditional lists give his age as in the early fifties. The precise execution ground is not always named consistently in summary notices; Seoul’s riverine sites of Saenamteo and Chŏldusan (Jeoldusan) were both used for Catholic executions in that period. He did not recant.

He is one of the 103 Korean Martyrs. Martyrs of the 1866 persecution whose causes were completed were beatified by Pope Paul VI on 6 October 1968, complementing the larger group from the 1839 and 1846 persecutions beatified in 1925. Pope John Paul II canonized all 103 in Seoul on 6 May 1984, during the first papal visit to Korea, under the collective title of Andrew Kim Taegon, Paul Chong Hasang, and Companions. Their liturgical memorial in the General Roman Calendar is 20 September. Peter Ch'oe Hyŏng is venerated as a saint of the Catholic Church; no separate, well-attested personal patronages, burial place, or detailed family record have been established in standard historical and hagiographical notices, and he is honored principally as one of the lay witnesses of the nineteenth-century Korean Church.