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Biography

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Peter Yu Tae-chol (also spelled Yu Tae-chŏl or Yu Dae-cheol; Korean: 유대철) was a Korean Catholic lay martyr of the Joseon period. He was born in 1826 in Seoul, in a family that had embraced Catholicism in the early nineteenth century. His father, Augustine Yu Chin-gil (Yu Jin-gil), belonged to the yangban scholarly class and became a notable convert; Augustine himself was arrested and put to death in the Gihae persecution of 1839. The Korean Catholic community of that era was unusual in having taken root largely through Korean initiative, after envoys encountered Catholic books in Beijing in the late eighteenth century, and for long stretches it survived with few or no resident foreign priests.

By the 1830s the Joseon court regarded the new religion as a threat to Confucian ritual, ancestral rites, and political loyalty. Periodic suppressions culminated in the Gihae persecution of 1839, during the reign of King Heonjong and the regency of Queen Sunwon. French missionaries including Bishop Laurent-Joseph-Marius Imbert and Fathers Pierre Maubant and Jacques Chastan were executed that year, together with a large number of Korean laity. Augustine Yu Chin-gil was among those beheaded in Seoul in September 1839. His son Peter, then about thirteen years old, was taken into custody as well.

Accounts preserved in the traditional acts of the Korean martyrs describe the boy as resolute under interrogation. Officials, counting on his youth, pressed him to recant and to name other Catholics. He refused to apostatize. He was subjected to beating and other judicial torture customary in Joseon criminal procedure. Unlike many adult companions who were publicly beheaded at sites such as Seosomun (the Small West Gate) in Seoul, Peter Yu Tae-chol died in prison in Seoul on 31 October 1839 from the effects of that torture. He is thus remembered as one of the youngest of the canonized Korean martyrs.

His cause formed part of the larger process for the Korean martyrs of the nineteenth century. He was beatified on 5 July 1925 by Pope Pius XI among seventy-nine martyrs of the persecutions of 1839 and 1846, and was canonized on 6 May 1984 in Seoul by Pope John Paul II as one of the 103 Korean Martyrs, officially titled Saint Andrew Kim Taegon, Saint Paul Chong Hasang, and Companions. The group is commemorated in the General Roman Calendar on 20 September. Peter Yu Tae-chol is invoked in Korean Catholic memory especially as a child witness to the faith of a church that had been sustained for decades by lay families under intermittent state violence.

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