Saint of the Week – St Andrew Kim Taegon and the Korean Martyrs



Name: Andrew Kim Taegon
Born: 21 August 1821; Solmou, Korea.
Died: 16 September 1846; Saenamteo (Seoul) Korea.
Feast Day: 20 September
Patron Saint of: Korea; Korean Clergy

In the second century Tertullian famously wrote that “the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church.” He was making the observation that wherever the Christians are persecuted and martyred the Church would frequently (and quite inexplicably) flourish in the succeeding generations. This is assuredly true of the Church in Korea which experienced among the most brutal and sustained persecutions in the annals of Church history.

Catholic missionaries (such as St Francis Xavier) had made inroads into Asia in the 16^th century with varying degrees of success. There is some evidence of Korean Christians in the late 16^th century, who probably brought Christianity back to Korea from China, where the Jesuit missionaries had made significant inroads. The greatest obstacle the Christian missionaries faced was not religious opposition but political opposition. Many of the ruling dynasties of the Far East (China, Japan, Korea, etc) eyed Western Christian missionaries with deep suspicion. They saw the religious conversion of their people as weaking their unified national identity and dividing their loyalties. In the 18^th century Korea adopted a policy of zero toleration of this Christian novelty and for a period of some 150 years Korean Christians faced execution for their forbidden faith. Consequently during this period there were no priests active in Korea until the arrival of a handful of Chinese Catholic priests after 1794. They smuggled Christian texts into Korea which heled propagate the faith. Despite having no sacraments (except Baptism) and no liturgies, throughout this century a small ‘underground’ community of Christians somehow miraculously survived in Korea, sustained by prayer and good catechesis. 

When Kim Taegon was born in 1821 the faith was being actively persecuted. His parents were devout Christian converts but being of a noble family they had the ability to turn their home into an ‘underground church’. Kim’s Father was subsequently martyred. Raised in this pious environment, at the age of fifteen Kim too was baptised and took the Christian name Andrew. He courageously sought ordination to the priesthood and so ventured on foot for half a year to begin seminary formation in the Portuguese colony in Macau; his studies also took him to the Philippines. After nine years of seminary studies in 1844 Andrew Kim Taegon was ordained a priest in Shanghai by the French missionary bishop, Jean Joseph Jean-Baptiste Ferréol. In 1845 Fr Taegon returned to Korea to begin his covert mission as a priest, fully conscious of the difficulties he would face and the price he could expect to pay for his endeavours. Ministering to known Christians was one thing, but evangelising non-Christians within such a hostile environment was an altogether more dangerous task. Nonetheless he enjoyed considerable success on account of his knowledge of the culture and no doubt helped by his social status as a nobleman. He was involved in an attempt to bring French missionary priests into Korea, by smuggling them onto a fishing boat but was arrested and charged with sedition and treason. He was tortured and every attempt was made to make him renounce his Christian faith and denounce other Christians. He withstood all these attempts to break his resolve and so was executed by the sword on 16 September 1846. His final words before his public execution were recorded thus:

This is my last hour of life, listen to me attentively: if I have held communication with foreigners, it has been for my religion and my God. It is for Him that I die. My immortal life is on the point of beginning. Become Christians if you wish to be happy after death, because God has eternal chastisements in store for those who have refused to know Him!

Andrew was 25 years old and had exercised little more than one year of priestly ministry in Korea. Andrew Kim Taegon’s execution was merely one of hundreds in this wave of persecution. In all, approximately 10,000 Korean Christians were martyred in the 18^th and 19^th centuries, which is an astonishing figure, proportionate to size of the Korean Christian population. As far as persecutions go it certainly rivals anything seen in the early Church under the pagan Roman Empire.

On 6^th May 1984 Pope John Paul II canonised St Andrew Kim Taegon, along with 102 other Korean martyrs, while visiting South Korea: it was a very different country from that of the previous century. Today Catholics in South Korea numbering about 5.8 million (11.3% of the population). Whereas in most Western nations Christianity has been in sharp decline, in Korea in the past twenty years the Church has actually grown. Vocations are also flourishing: the country has approximately 5,000 priests and 9,000 nuns. The supreme irony is that Christianity (taken as a whole) is now the majority religion in North Korea, overtaking Buddhism - an extraordinary fact when one considers how recently Christianity has been established in Korea and the brutality of its history. In the case of Korea, it would seem Tertullian was right: the blood of the martyrs was indeed the seed of the Church, and today we can see how strongly the faith has taken root, something Andrew Kim Taegon and his companions could scarcely have imagined. The prayers, sacrifices and witness of these heroic Korean martyrs were not in vain.

St Andrew Kim Taegon and companions, pray for us!