Peter Yi Ho-yŏng

Peter Yi Ho-yŏng (Korean: 이호영; baptismal name Peter) was a nineteenth-century Korean Catholic layman who died a martyr’s death in prison during the Joseon dynasty’s campaigns against Christianity. He was born in 1803 in Seoul. The Catholic Church in Korea had been founded not by foreign missionaries but by Korean lay scholars who, in the 1780s, encountered Catholic books in Beijing and baptized one another, beginning with Yi Sŭng-hun. From the start the new religion was treated as a dangerous deviation from Confucian ritual and political orthodoxy, because Catholics refused the prescribed ancestral rites and acknowledged a spiritual authority beyond the king. State persecutions followed in 1791, in 1801 (the Sinyu persecution, in which hundreds died), and repeatedly thereafter. Yi Ho-yŏng thus grew up in a community that already knew imprisonment, exile, and execution as the possible cost of baptism, and in a country that remained closed to most foreign contact.

By the 1830s the Catholic community, though still small and often without resident priests for long stretches, had taken root among both commoners and some members of the yangban class. French missionaries of the Société des Missions Étrangères de Paris began to enter Korea in secret in that decade. Their presence, together with the continued refusal of Catholics to perform ancestral rites in the Confucian manner, provoked renewed government action. Yi Ho-yŏng was arrested in this climate of suspicion. Interrogations of Korean Catholics typically demanded that the prisoner denounce the faith, reveal the names of other believers and of any missionaries, and perform a public gesture of apostasy such as trampling on a crucifix or reciting a formula of recantation. Those who refused were beaten, fitted with the heavy wooden cangue, and confined in overcrowded and unsanitary prisons where disease and starvation were common.

Yi Ho-yŏng did not recant. He died in prison in Seoul in 1838, worn down by torture, confinement, and privation, at about thirty-five years of age. His death came shortly before the more widely recorded Gihae persecution of 1839, in which scores of Catholics, including the lay leader Paul Chong Hasang and several French missionaries, were publicly executed by beheading or strangulation. Because Yi Ho-yŏng died in custody rather than on the execution ground, fewer contemporary records of his last words or of a public witness survive than for some of his companions. The Catholic Church nevertheless judged his death to have been endured for the faith and numbered him among the martyrs of Korea. Individual biographical details about him remain relatively sparse in the surviving documentation, which is typical of many of the lay martyrs whose names were preserved in lists compiled by the community and later by missionaries.

On 5 July 1925 Pope Pius XI beatified seventy-nine Korean martyrs who had suffered in the persecutions of the 1830s and 1840s; Peter Yi Ho-yŏng was included in that group. On 6 May 1984, during an apostolic visit to the Republic of Korea, Pope John Paul II canonized those seventy-nine together with twenty-four further martyrs principally of the 1866 Byeongin persecution, a total of 103 saints known collectively as Saint Andrew Kim Taegon, Saint Paul Chong Hasang, and Companions. Their feast is kept on 20 September in the General Roman Calendar. Peter Yi Ho-yŏng is thus venerated as a saint of the Catholic Church. He remains a comparatively little-documented figure beside the first Korean priest, Andrew Kim Taegon, or the prominent lay catechist Paul Chong Hasang, but Korean Catholic tradition honors him as one of the ordinary faithful whose steadfastness under interrogation and in prison helped the Church in Korea survive a century of intermittent and often ferocious persecution.