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Biography

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Peter Nam Kyŏng-mun (남경문), known in the Church by his baptismal name Peter, was a Korean Catholic lay catechist and martyr of the Joseon period. He was born in 1790 in Seoul (then Hanseong). Korean Catholic sources record that he passed the military examination (mugwa) and served as a military official. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries the Catholic Church in Korea, first received by lay scholars from Beijing and still often without resident clergy, was repeatedly prohibited by the state. Nam was baptized as an adult and took the name Peter. Finding public office incompatible with Catholic practice—above all the refusal of Confucian ancestral rites expected of officials—he resigned his post.

Thereafter he served the Catholic community as a hoejang, a lay leader and catechist who instructed believers, encouraged the faithful, and helped organize local congregations when priests were absent or in hiding. Korean Catholicism in this era depended heavily on such lay leaders. He continued this work after the Gihae persecution of 1839, which had already claimed many Catholic lives in Seoul and the provinces, including members of families later associated with the Korean martyrs.

In 1846 the Joseon authorities opened another campaign against Catholics in the capital, in the course of which Korea’s first native priest, Andrew Kim Taegŏn, was arrested and later executed. Peter Nam was himself arrested that year, imprisoned in Seoul, and pressed under torture to recant and to denounce others. He did not apostatize. On 20 September 1846 he was executed by hanging (strangulation) at the execution ground outside the Small West Gate (Seosomun) in Seoul. He was fifty-six years of age.

He was beatified by Pope Pius XI on 5 July 1925 among seventy-nine Korean martyrs, and canonized by Pope John Paul II on 6 May 1984 in Seoul among the one hundred and three Korean Martyr Saints (Andrew Kim Taegŏn, Paul Chŏng Hasang, and companions). Their collective feast is kept on 20 September. Surviving historical notices concentrate on his military background, his role as a catechist, and his death; details of his family life are not firmly established in the sources commonly used for his cult.

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