Siméon-François Berneux

Siméon-François Berneux was a nineteenth-century French Catholic missionary bishop who served as Vicar Apostolic of Korea and was put to death in the Byeongin persecution of 1866. He was born in 1814 at Château-du-Loir in the Sarthe region of western France. After seminary studies he was ordained a priest and entered the Paris Foreign Missions Society (Société des Missions Étrangères de Paris), a society of apostolic life devoted to overseas evangelization. In the early 1840s he was sent to Tonkin in present-day northern Vietnam, where he was imprisoned for a time on account of his missionary work. After his release he was assigned to Manchuria, where he continued pastoral service among Chinese Catholics for a number of years.

In the mid-1850s Berneux was named Vicar Apostolic of Korea and consecrated a bishop, becoming the fourth holder of that vicariate after earlier French missionaries who had died or been martyred on the peninsula. He entered Korea secretly in 1856, at a period when Christianity was still legally forbidden and foreign clergy risked capital punishment. Over the following decade he organized the small Korean Catholic community, founded a seminary for native clergy, oversaw the printing of catechetical and liturgical books, and multiplied mission stations. Under his direction the number of Catholics in Korea increased substantially, even though the Church remained an underground body subject to intermittent local harassment and the constant threat of a new nationwide persecution.

The political situation changed sharply in 1866. The regent Heungseon Daewongun, governing for the young King Gojong, adopted a policy of isolation and of suppressing Christianity, in part as a reaction to foreign pressure and internal unrest. Berneux was arrested in February 1866, taken to Seoul, interrogated, and tortured. He was condemned to death and beheaded on 8 March 1866 at Saenamteo, an execution ground on the Han River. Other French missionaries of the Paris Foreign Missions Society, including his coadjutor Bishop Marie-Nicolas-Antoine Daveluy and several priests, were executed in the same campaign, as were many Korean clergy and lay Catholics. The bodies of the martyrs were buried hastily near the place of execution; relics were later recovered by the faithful.

Berneux was beatified by Pope Paul VI in 1968 among the martyrs of the 1866 persecution, and was canonized by Pope John Paul II on 6 May 1984 in Seoul together with 102 other Korean martyrs (the group commonly known as Saint Andrew Kim Taegon, Paul Chong Hasang, and Companions). The Catholic Church commemorates these saints collectively on 20 September. His life is remembered as that of a missionary bishop who remained with his flock under persecution and who died for the Christian faith in nineteenth-century Korea.