Follow the lead of the Korean martyrs

Aug 21, 2014

By Gerard O’Connell
“Lay people were the first apostles of Korea,” Pope Francis said in his homily at Mass in Seoul after beatifying 124 martyrs from the infancy period of the Church in “the land of the morning calm.”

“All of them lived and died for Christ, and now they reign with him in joy and in glory,” he told the 800,000 people at the ceremony in front of Seoul’s Gwanghwamun Gate, a place closely linked to the past and recent history of this country. The place is not far from the site where many martyrs were executed and which he visited before Mass.

All but one of this group of 124 martyrs, led by Paul Yun Ji-chung, were lay people. It included 100 men and 24 women; the oldest was a 75 year old man, the youngest a girl of 12.

The exception was Fr James Ju Mun-mo, a Chinese priest from the Beijing diocese. He was the first priest to enter Korea, and came to serve the young Christian community that was born in 1784. By the time he arrived, ten years later, the community had 4,000 members.

The beatification ceremony, attended by cardinals and bishops from at least 20 Asian countries under a merciless sun and high humidity, was the highpoint of the Pope’s visit here for Korea’s 5.4 million Catholics in this country of 50 million people. “

These martyrs are our ancestors. They died rather than sell out the faith, and we are so proud and happy that Pope Francis is beatifying them,” Benedictus Lee, a 50 year old manager in a hi-tech company told me before the ceremony began.

For him, and indeed for all Korean Catholics, this was a truly historical moment, one which they participated in a deeply prayerful and impressive way. They reacted with awe and uttered a highly audible gasp when an image on the 124 new blessed was flashed on the maxi-TV screens at either side of the altar, immediately after the Pope declared them blessed.

Throughout his visit here, Pope Francis has returned time and again to the martyrs. He did so with the Korean bishops on his first day here, and also yesterday in his extraordinarily successful meeting with 4,000 young Catholics from 27 Asian countries at the shrine of Solome, the birthplace of Saint Andrew Kim Taegon, the first Korean priest.

In actual fact, “the Holy Father is very moved by the fact of martyrdom in the history of the Church and also today. It is something that he is reflecting profoundly on,” the Director of the Vatican Press Office, Fr Federico Lombardi revealed at a press briefing here.

The historical record shows that Christians have been persecuted in all of East Asia in past centuries, not just in Korea but also in Japan, Vietnam and China too. “The martyrdom of Christians in Korea and Japan is a very moving and amazing story,” Fr Gianni Criviller, a member of PIME—an Italian missionary order, who lives in Hong Kong and who knows this area of the world and its history well, told me. But the numbers “were particularly high” in Korea, he added.

In actual fact, 10,000 Christians were martyred in Korea; the overwhelming majority of them were lay people, men women and even children. At times, whole communities were executed, together with their priests.-- America