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The saints

Sts. Andrew Kim Taegon, Paul Chong Hasang and Companions

A Church started by lay people reading books, and its first Korean priest, martyred at twenty-five.

Feast: 20 September · 1839 to 1867 · The modern era · Korea

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A plain typographic plate: Sts. Andrew Kim Taegon, Paul Chong Hasang and Companions, with the feast day.

Typographic plate by Stone & Incense: we found no public-domain image of this saint we could verify.

Home / The saints / Sts. Andrew Kim Taegon, Paul Chong Hasang and Companions

Seoul, Korea, 1846

The faith came to Korea in the 1700s through lay scholars who read Christian books from China.1

They had no priests for years, and the Church grew anyway.1

Andrew Kim Taegon was the first Korean-born priest, and he was beheaded in 1846 at twenty-five.

Patronage No official patronage we can cite yet. The Church remembers them as the 103 martyrs of Korea.

01Sts. Andrew Kim Taegon, Paul Chong Hasang and Companions

The saints of Korea

Paul Chong Hasang was a lay leader, and many of the martyrs were lay men and women.1

Pope John Paul II canonized them during his visit to Seoul in 1984.1

Live it this week

Read your faith for yourself

Korea’s Church began with lay people reading. Pick one Catholic book this week (a Gospel, the Catechism’s section on prayer, a saint’s life) and read thirty pages.

Notes

How we know · 1 source for this page
  1. Franciscan Media, Saint of the Day: “Saints Andrew Kim Taegon, Paul Chong Hasang, and Companions”. franciscanmedia.org. franciscanmedia.org

The Catholic Encyclopedia (1913) is in the public domain; we quote the New Advent edition. Texts of the Holy See are quoted briefly from vatican.va. Scripture: World English Bible, Catholic edition (public domain); Verse numbers are modern, with Douay-Rheims numbers in brackets where they differ. Photographs: Wikimedia Commons, credited under each image; full list on the photo credits page.

Lines in the narrator’s voice, without a note, are our reflection, not a historical claim. Stone & Incense restates Church teaching in plain words; our wording is not an official Church text. Report an errorCorrections.