Sinyu Catholic Persecution
The Korean court executed some three hundred Catholics in 1801, about fifteen years after the religion arrived without any missionary. Catholicism entered Korea as a book. Korean envoys to Peking brought back Chinese-language works by Jesuit missionaries, and a group of young Confucian scholars studied them as Western Learning and concluded that they were true; one of them, Yi Sŭng-hun, went to Peking in 1784 and was baptised, and the community organised itself and began administering sacraments before any priest arrived. What made it intolerable was ancestral rites. Rome had ruled in 1742 that Catholics could not perform them, and in a Confucian state the rites are the foundation of the family, the social order and the legitimacy of the monarchy — so a Catholic was by definition a subversive. The first executions came in 1791 when a convert burned his mother's tablets. The persecution of 1801 followed the death of the tolerant king Chŏngjo and the accession of a child under a regent from a hostile faction, and it was factional politics as much as doctrine: the converts were concentrated in the Southerner faction, which the dominant party wanted destroyed. Chou Wen-mo, a Chinese priest who had entered secretly, gave himself up and was executed. The Hwang Sa-yŏng letter, intercepted on its way to Peking, asked for a Western fleet to compel toleration, which confirmed every official suspicion. Persecutions continued to 1866, and Korea has some 103 canonised martyrs. Korea is the only country where Catholicism was established by lay converts before any missionary arrived, which is why the church there dates itself from a bookstall in Peking rather than from a mission. It now has some five and a half million members.
- Year: 1801 CE
- Category: Political
