The Missionary Era · 1784-1886 · Korea
Korean Catholic Origins
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About This Movement
Korea is the only country in the world where the Catholic Church began without a missionary. In the late eighteenth century a circle of Confucian scholars near Seoul studied Chinese-language Catholic books, convinced themselves, and sent one of their number, Yi Sung-hun, to Beijing to be baptized in 1784. He came home and baptized the others, and a church of several thousand people existed before a priest had ever set foot in the country. It was written in Korean from the start — Chong Yak-chong's catechism was in the vernacular script rather than in the scholarly Chinese of the elite. Which is part of why it reached women, servants and the poor as fast as it reached the literati. The Choson state read it as treason against the Confucian order, and the church spent a century under persecution, with something on the order of ten thousand Korean Catholics killed in successive purges between 1801 and 1866, until a treaty with France in 1886 finally brought the killing to an end.
Sources
- The self-evangelized church's own documents: Chong Yak-chong, Chugyo yoji (c. 1798-1801, vernacular han'gul catechism); the community's letters to Beijing and Rome (1784-, incl. the 1811 letter to the Pope); Yi Byeok's Essence of Sacred Doctrine (primary) — This is the lay church teaching itself, in its own hand. The attribution of the Essence of Sacred Doctrine to Yi Byeok is debated among scholars. English-language access is chiefly through Baker and Rausch's translations.
- The Hwang Sa-yong silk letter (1801) (primary) — A believer's appeal written on silk during the Sinyu persecution, intercepted by authorities. It survives only in the persecutors' own archive, and it combines genuine faith testimony with a politically sensitive appeal for foreign intervention - both parts of the record, without softening either.
- The persecution records: Sinyu (1801), Kihae (1839), Pyongo (1846), Pyongin (1866) interrogation and execution records in the Choson annals and police archives (primary) — These are the persecutors' own records: the martyrs' testimony as it survives through interrogation and torture, not their own words freely given.
- Women's voices: Columba Kang Wan-suk (catechist, executed 1801) in trial records and martyrology; the women catechists' cell-structure centrality; Daveluy's martyr-account compilations (primary) — This material passes through two filters: hostile court records and later hagiographic compilation. Daveluy's martyr-account compilations were made by missionaries who reached Korea only after these events, adding another layer of outside mediation.
- Don Baker with Franklin Rausch, Catholics and Anti-Catholicism in Choson Korea (Hawai'i, 2017), with James Grayson, Korea: A Religious History (rev. ed. 2002) (secondary) — The current standard study, including English translations of the Chugyo yoji and the silk letter.
- Cambridge History of Christianity vol. 8, ch. 30 'Christianity in East Asia: China, Korea and Japan' (Bays & Grayson) (reference) — Grayson is a specialist in Korean church history, making this a direct fit.