Theresa Kim

Theresa Kim, known in Korean as Kim Im-i Teresa (김임이 데레사), was a nineteenth-century Catholic laywoman and martyr of Joseon Korea. She was born in 1811, in the decades after Catholicism had entered Korea through lay Confucian scholars and, later, through Chinese and French clergy. The Joseon state forbade the religion, treating it as a threat to ancestral rites and to royal authority. Catholic life therefore survived in secret households and village networks. Theresa belonged to that underground community. She remained unmarried and is remembered among the virgin martyrs of the Korean Church, a title the sources of her cause consistently give her; Korea at that date had no established female religious congregations of the European type.

The Gihae persecution of 1839 was among the most severe anti-Catholic campaigns of the Joseon period. After political shifts at court, officials arrested catechists, missionaries, and ordinary believers. Theresa was imprisoned and interrogated with the corporal punishments then used to force recantation and the betrayal of other Christians. Korean Catholic records compiled from interrogations and from the testimony of survivors state that she refused to apostatize. On 20 September 1839 she was beheaded at Seosomun, the Small West Gate of Seoul, a customary execution ground for many of that year’s martyrs. She was twenty-eight. The same year saw the deaths of numerous other laywomen and laymen; the first Korean priest, Andrew Kim Taegon, would be martyred in a later outbreak in 1846.

Almost nothing intimate about her childhood, occupation, or daily piety survives beyond her identity as a virgin of a Catholic family and the circumstances of her arrest and death. That scarcity is typical of the lay martyrs of 1839, whose lives are known chiefly through government records, missionary reports, and the biographies assembled by the Korean Church in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Precise birthplace and the site of her burial are not firmly established in those sources. Bodies of those executed at Seosomun were often recovered in secret by fellow Catholics for clandestine burial, a practice that later supplied relics, but her individual grave is not documented with certainty.

She was included among the seventy-nine Korean martyrs beatified by Pope Pius XI on 5 July 1925. On 6 May 1984 Pope John Paul II canonized those seventy-nine together with twenty-four companions—103 saints in all—during an outdoor Mass in Seoul. Their collective memorial is kept on 20 September, the feast of Saint Andrew Kim Taegon, Saint Paul Chong Hasang, and companions. Theresa Kim is therefore venerated with the other Korean martyrs rather than as the subject of a large independent cult; her memory belongs to the foundation story of a Church that had been planted by laity and tested by repeated persecution in the nineteenth century.