Sebastian Nam I-gwan

Sebastian Nam I-gwan was a Korean Catholic layman, catechist, and martyr of the nineteenth century, venerated as one of the 103 Korean Martyrs of the Catholic Church. He was born in 1780 in Hongju, in Chungcheong Province of the Joseon kingdom, corresponding to present-day Hongseong in South Chungcheong Province. He belonged to a yangban family, the hereditary nobility of Joseon Korea. He converted to Catholicism and received the baptismal name Sebastian. In his lifetime the Church in Korea remained a largely underground community. It had been begun in the 1780s by lay scholars who encountered Catholic books from China and sought baptism, and it endured long stretches without resident clergy. Converts of Nam I-gwan's generation therefore learned the faith in secret and at considerable personal risk, because the Joseon state treated Catholicism as a heterodox teaching that rejected Confucian ancestral rites and so threatened the moral and political order.

After his conversion Nam I-gwan served as a catechist, known in the Korean Church as a hoejang, a lay leader responsible for instructing believers and holding the community together. In the absence of priests for much of the early nineteenth century, such catechists were indispensable: they taught doctrine, prepared candidates, and maintained discipline and mutual support among scattered Catholics. Foreign missionaries entered Korea only intermittently. French priests of the Société des Missions Étrangères de Paris, including Bishop Laurent-Joseph-Marius Imbert and Fathers Pierre Maubant and Jacques-Honoré Chastan, were present in the late 1830s and worked with Korean lay leaders. Nam I-gwan's ministry belongs to that collaboration between a small number of missionaries and a much larger network of Korean catechists and householders.

In 1839 the Gihae persecution broke out, one of the most severe of the Joseon campaigns against Catholicism. The court moved to arrest missionaries and Korean Catholics after the presence of the French clergy became known. Bishop Imbert and Fathers Maubant and Chastan were captured and were beheaded at Seoul on 21 September 1839. Nam I-gwan was likewise arrested, brought to the capital, and interrogated under torture. He refused to apostatize. On 26 September 1839 he was beheaded at Seosomun, the Small West Gate of Seoul, a regular site of public execution, when he was about sixty years old. Numerous other Korean Catholics, men and women of various ages and social ranks, were put to death in the same persecution.

The Holy See later recognized his death as martyrdom. Pope Pius XI beatified Sebastian Nam I-gwan on 5 July 1925 together with seventy-eight other Korean martyrs of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Pope John Paul II canonized him in Seoul on 6 May 1984, during a pastoral visit to Korea, as one of the 103 Martyr Saints of Korea—Saint Andrew Kim Taegon, Saint Paul Chong Hasang, and one hundred one companions. Their liturgical feast is celebrated on 20 September. He is honored in the Catholic Church as a saint and martyr, and he is commemorated with the whole company of the Korean martyrs, including at sites in Seoul associated with the Seosomun executions.