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Biography

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Peter Son Sŏn-ji (Korean: 손선지 베드로) was a Korean lay Catholic and martyr of the Joseon period, numbered among the 103 Korean Martyrs of the Catholic Church. Catholicism first took root in Korea in 1784, when Yi Sŭng-hun was baptized in Beijing and returned with books and the sacraments to a circle of Confucian scholars in Seoul. The community that formed thereafter developed for years with almost no resident clergy, relying on lay leadership. Joseon authorities regarded the new religion as a heterodox threat to ritual and social order, above all because Catholics refused ancestral rites. Major persecutions followed in 1801, 1839, 1846 and 1866. Son Sŏn-ji belonged to this underground Church.

He was born in 1820 and grew to adulthood in a community that already knew the cost of discipleship. The Gihae persecution of 1839 had claimed French missionaries and Korean laity, including the lay leader Paul Chŏng Hasang. The first Korean priest, Andrew Kim Taegŏn, was martyred in 1846. Despite these blows the number of believers continued to grow in secret. Lay catechists instructed families, baptized in the absence of priests, and prepared the dying. It was in this setting of hidden practice and recurrent danger that Son Sŏn-ji lived as a member of the laity rather than as a cleric or a member of a religious order.

In 1866 the Byeongin persecution erupted under the regency of Heungseon Daewongun, who pursued a policy of rigorous exclusion of foreign influence. French bishops and priests of the Paris Foreign Missions Society who had entered the country clandestinely were arrested, together with large numbers of Korean Catholics. Prisoners were pressed to recant; those who refused were commonly tortured and beheaded. Peter Son Sŏn-ji was seized in the course of this campaign. He would not apostatize and was put to death in 1866. His martyrdom belongs to the large group of Korean lay men and women who perished that year alongside Bishop Siméon-François Berneux, Bishop Antoine Daveluy and their missionary companions.

Recognition of the Korean martyrs by the Holy See proceeded in stages. On 5 July 1925 Pope Pius XI beatified seventy-nine martyrs, chiefly those of 1839 and 1846. On 6 October 1968 Pope Paul VI beatified twenty-four further martyrs, most of them victims of 1866; Son Sŏn-ji is counted in this latter group. On 6 May 1984, during an apostolic visit to Korea, Pope John Paul II canonized all 103 in a ceremony at Yeouido in Seoul. Their common liturgical memorial is 20 September, the feast of Saints Andrew Kim Taegŏn, Paul Chŏng Hasang and Companions. Surviving personal particulars about Son Sŏn-ji himself are limited in published sources; unlike the French bishops and the first Korean priest, many Korean lay martyrs are known primarily by name, status as laity, and the fact of their martyrdom. Korean Catholic tradition and the documentation assembled for the beatification processes identify him as a faithful witness who chose death rather than apostasy. He is honored with the other Korean martyrs as one of those who established the Church on the Korean peninsula at the cost of their lives.

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