Theresa Yi Mae-im

Theresa Yi Mae-im, also rendered Teresa Yi Mae-im or Yi Mae-im Teresa, was a Korean Catholic laywoman who suffered martyrdom during the Gihae persecution of 1839 in Joseon Korea. She was born in 1819. The Catholic Church in Korea at that time was still young. It had taken root in the late eighteenth century when Korean scholars encountered Catholic books brought from China, and a community of believers formed even before the arrival of foreign clergy. The Joseon state regarded Catholicism as a dangerous heterodoxy that threatened Confucian social order, ancestral rites, and loyalty to the throne. Periodic persecutions followed, of which the Gihae persecution of 1839 was among the most severe.

Relatively few personal details about Theresa Yi Mae-im have been preserved. She belonged to a Catholic family and lived her faith in a society in which discovery could mean imprisonment, torture, and death. Korean Catholic communities of the period often gathered in secret, taught the catechism in the vernacular, and relied on lay leaders. Women played a notable role in sustaining household faith and in instructing children and neighbors. When the 1839 persecution intensified under the regency of Queen Sunwon, officials hunted Catholics across the provinces and in the capital.

Theresa was arrested, interrogated, and tortured in an effort to make her apostatize. She refused to deny her faith. On 20 September 1839 she was beheaded in Seoul. She was about twenty years of age. She died together with other Korean Catholics, including several women, at one of the execution grounds used by the Joseon authorities, commonly identified with the area of Seosomun in Seoul. The bodies of many of the 1839 martyrs were recovered by fellow believers at night and given clandestine burial, though the precise resting place of Theresa Yi Mae-im is not securely documented in surviving sources.

She was among the Korean martyrs beatified by Pope Pius XI on 5 July 1925. Those beatified in 1925 were principally the victims of the persecutions of 1839 and 1846. On 6 May 1984 Pope John Paul II canonized 103 Korean martyrs, including Theresa Yi Mae-im, during a Mass in Seoul. The canonization was the first to be celebrated outside Rome in modern times and marked a landmark moment for the Korean Catholic Church. The liturgical memorial of Saint Andrew Kim Taegon, Saint Paul Chong Hasang, and their companions, the 103 Korean Martyrs, is kept on 20 September.

Theresa Yi Mae-im is venerated as one of the holy martyrs of Korea. Individual biographical notices about her remain brief because the historical record for many lay Korean martyrs consists mainly of government interrogation documents and later Church compilations. Her witness, together with that of the other martyrs of 1839, belongs to the foundational memory of Korean Catholicism, a Church that grew through the perseverance of laypeople under persecution.