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Biography

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Thomas Son Chasuhn was a Korean Catholic layman and martyr of the nineteenth century, counted among the 103 Korean Martyrs later canonized by the Catholic Church. He was born in 1838 in Korea during the Joseon dynasty, an era in which the Catholic faith—introduced in the late eighteenth century largely through lay study of Christian books rather than by an initial missionary establishment—remained illegal and was repeatedly targeted by the state. Korean Catholics of his generation typically received and transmitted the faith within family and village networks that had already survived earlier waves of persecution, notably those of 1801, 1839, and 1846. Surviving records of his childhood, exact birthplace, and family circumstances are sparse, as is common for many Korean lay martyrs whose lives were reconstructed from later testimony rather than from contemporary civil archives.

Church sources generally describe him as a farmer and a practicing believer who lived under the constant possibility of denunciation. In mid-nineteenth-century Joseon, Christianity was treated as a heterodox teaching associated with foreign influence, and Catholics faced confiscation of property, imprisonment, torture, and death. A small number of French priests of the Paris Foreign Missions Society ministered in secret, but the community was still predominantly lay in character. Thomas belonged to that underground Church. Precise details of his occupation, marriage, or children are not firmly established in the standard historical notices, and it is more accurate to leave those points unset than to infer them from the general pattern of Korean village life.

In 1866 the Heungseon Daewongun, regent for the young King Gojong, launched the Byeongin persecution, the most extensive anti-Catholic campaign of the Joseon period. The policy combined hostility to Christianity with fear of French and other Western encroachment after conflicts involving missionaries and foreign shipping. Thousands of Korean Catholics were killed that year, together with several French bishops and priests. Thomas Son Chasuhn was arrested in the course of this persecution, interrogated, and pressed to recant. He refused apostasy and was executed by beheading on 30 January 1866. He was twenty-eight years old. His death belongs to the opening phase of the 1866 massacres; the exact execution ground is not securely identified in the brief English-language notices, though several well-known martyrdom sites of that year (including places in the Chungcheong region and near the capital) are documented for other victims.

Recognition by the Holy See came in stages. Martyrs of the 1839 and 1846 persecutions were beatified in 1925. Thomas, as a victim of 1866, was among those beatified by Pope Paul VI on 6 October 1968. Pope John Paul II canonized the full group of 103 Korean Martyrs, including Thomas Son Chasuhn, on 6 May 1984 in Seoul. Their collective liturgical memorial in the General Roman Calendar is 20 September. He is venerated as a saint of the Catholic Church. No distinct individual patronages—of places, professions, or causes—are attached to him in standard martyrologies beyond his share in the group cult of the Korean Martyrs, and many biographical particulars remain unknown because of the destruction of records and the clandestine conditions of Catholic life in nineteenth-century Korea.

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