Pierre Aumaître

Pierre Aumaître was a French Catholic missionary priest and martyr of the nineteenth-century Korean Church. He was born on 8 May 1837 in Aizecq, a rural commune in the Charente department of western France. He grew up in a Catholic farming milieu and entered clerical formation with the intention of serving in the foreign missions. He joined the Paris Foreign Missions Society (Société des Missions Étrangères de Paris), a society of apostolic life that sent secular priests to East and Southeast Asia. After completing his studies he was ordained a priest in 1862. The society assigned him to the Vicariate Apostolic of Korea, whose bishops and priests lived in concealment because the Joseon monarchy had banned Christianity and had already carried out several bloody persecutions of Korean Catholics since the early nineteenth century.

Entry into Korea required stealth. Missionaries usually approached from China and were smuggled ashore with the help of Korean Catholics. Aumaître reached Korea in 1865. He spent the following months learning Korean and sharing the hidden pastoral work of the mission, which by then numbered some tens of thousands of baptized Koreans despite decades of intermittent persecution. His ministry lasted only a short time. In early 1866 political tension, xenophobia, and the regency of Heungseon Daewongun produced a new campaign against Catholics, later called the Byeongin Persecution. Bishop Siméon-François Berneux and several priests were arrested in the capital and executed at Saenamteo in early March. The remaining missionaries, including Bishop Antoine Daveluy, Father Martin-Luc Huin, and Father Pierre Aumaître, were pursued in the southern provinces.

Daveluy, Aumaître, and Huin were captured, interrogated, and sentenced to death. On 30 March 1866 they were taken to Galmaemot, a coastal execution site in Chungcheong province, and beheaded. Aumaître was twenty-eight years old. Korean catechists and lay believers were put to death in the same wave of persecution, which claimed many thousands of lives over the following months. The bodies of the martyrs were at first left or buried without honor; later Catholic communities recovered remains and established places of memory, including a shrine at Galmaemot associated with Daveluy, Aumaître, Huin, and Korean companions.

The Holy See examined the cause of the Korean martyrs in stages. A first group had been beatified in 1925. Aumaître belonged to a further group beatified by Pope Paul VI on 6 October 1968. Pope John Paul II canonized 103 Korean Martyrs, including Pierre Aumaître, on 6 May 1984 in Seoul. Their collective liturgical memorial is kept on 20 September. Aumaître is venerated as a priest-martyr who, after only a brief period on the Korean mission, died with his bishop and a fellow priest rather than abandon the faith or the people he had been sent to serve.