Theresa Kim Im-i

Teresa Kim Im-i (Korean: Kim Im-i Teresa, 김임이 데레사) was a nineteenth-century Korean Catholic laywoman and martyr, one of the 103 Korean Martyrs formally recognized as saints by the Catholic Church. She was born in 1811 in Seoul, the capital of the Joseon kingdom, into a Catholic family. Korean Catholicism in her lifetime was a prohibited religion. It had taken root in the late eighteenth century through Korean scholars who encountered Catholic books in China and through the baptism of Yi Seung-hun in Beijing in 1784, and it spread largely under lay leadership before foreign clergy could enter the country in any numbers. Successive persecutions—notably those of 1801 and 1839—had already claimed many lives among the small Christian community by the time of her birth and youth.

Traditional biographies compiled from Korean Church records describe Teresa Kim Im-i as a woman who embraced a life of virginity for religious reasons and who never married. In the Joseon Catholic community it was not uncommon for devout women to remain unmarried and to live as consecrated virgins within their families or among fellow believers, instructing children and catechumens and sustaining clandestine worship, although they did not belong to a canonical religious order. She resided in Seoul and practiced the faith under the constant risk of denunciation, since Catholic refusal of Confucian ancestral rites was treated as a challenge to the moral and political order of the state.

In 1846 the Joseon government launched another severe campaign against Catholics, known as the Byeong-o persecution. That year also saw the arrest and execution of Korea’s first native-born priest, Andrew Kim Taegon, and of the prominent lay leader Paul Chong Hasang, together with other members of the community and in a climate of suspicion toward French missionaries of the Paris Foreign Missions Society. Teresa Kim Im-i was arrested in Seoul. Interrogated about her religion, she refused to apostatize. The surviving acts of the martyrs record that she was condemned for her Christian faith and put to death by beheading on 20 September 1846 in Seoul. She was about thirty-five years old. As with many of the capital’s Catholic victims, the place of execution is associated with the public grounds outside the city gates, commonly the area of the Small West Gate (Seosomun).

Her cause was included among the Korean martyrs of the mid-nineteenth century. She was beatified by Pope Paul VI on 6 October 1968 and canonized by Pope John Paul II on 6 May 1984 during the pope’s apostolic visit to Seoul, in a ceremony that raised Andrew Kim Taegon, Paul Chong Hasang, and 100 companions to the altars. The group is commemorated on 20 September. Beyond the outline preserved in the beatification documents and the Korean martyr lists—her origin in Seoul, her status as a virgin laywoman, her arrest in the 1846 persecution, and her execution for refusing to abandon the Catholic faith—few additional personal details can be verified from independent historical sources, a limitation that applies to a large number of the lay men and women who died in the Joseon persecutions.