Ch 15 - A Crumbling Dynasty

Choson's Catholic Church

Choson's small Catholic community continued to expand its influence throughout the country in the face of continuing persecutions. Priests from China continued to enter the country under penalty of death to minister to those in need. Ironically, repeated persecutions only strengthened the church's presence and actually resulted in many martyrs being nominated for sainthood in Choson.

From the time Catholicism was first introduced into Choson, the central government's policy towards the alien religion had been inextricably tied to factional politics. If the ruling clan or dominant political faction felt sympathetic toward or indifferent to the western religion, its practitioners were pretty much left alone. Under the reign of King Sunjo however, the stridently anti-Catholic Noron faction went on the attack, proclaiming practitioners of the western religion to be heretics and instigating the bloody Shinyu Persecution of 1801. The church went underground following the persecution and managed to avoid all conflicts with the royal court. The relative calm did not last long.

Localized outbreaks of religious persecution broke out during the second decade of the nineteenth century in numerous locations throughout southern Choson. A large number of Catholic refugees from the Shinyu Persecution in 1801 fled to the remote mountainous regions of southern Kyongsang-do Province, where they lived in relative safety. At a time when general famine and hardship were commonplace in the province, the wealth and prosperity of these former refugees aroused the jealousy of their neighbors. Worse, their continued adherence to Catholicism provided all the pretext needed by envious citizens to attack. The violent Ulhae Persecution of 1815 took the lives of hundreds of Catholics before its fury was finally spent. Choson's central government made another attempt to suppress Catholicism in the Chonghae Persecution of 1827, by attacking Catholics in Cholla-do Province. The effort was far less deadly than the Ulhae Persecution however, and ended sooner.

In Seoul, Choson's government seemed to continue as it had before despite the maneuvering of political factions;  despite ambitious clans battling each other for power in and around the royal court;  despite the challenge of a new religion taking root in its midst and a country in rebellion. After recovering from a severe illness in 1827, King Sunjo designated Prince Ikchong as crown prince. Ikchong's wife, the Princess Cho Sin-chung, was the daughter of Cho Man-yong, a leading figure in the Pungyang Cho clan. In another of those strange twists of fate that seem to be a perennial feature of Choson politics, Prince Ikchong died while Sunjo still sat on the throne. Following King Sunjo's death in 1834, Prince Ikchong's eight-year-old son, grandson of the former monarch, ascended the Phoenix Throne as King Hongjong. The formidable in-law lineage of the Pungyang Cho clan led by the king's grandmother, Queen Cho, replaced the Andong Kim clan in the transition of power. Queen Cho secured her family's position by marrying a woman of the Cho clan to the young King Hongjong. The queen's father, Cho Man-yong, helped assure the dominance of his clan by taking the post of a powerful court minister. Her uncle, Cho In-yong, became Chief State Councilor and a large number of Cho clansmen received appointments to important government posts.

Despite the continuing persecutions, Catholic leaders continued to request the Bishop in Beijing to send a resident priest to Choson. The status of the Catholic church in China had changed dramatically since the time of Matteo Ricci in the early seventeenth century and was under fire from the ruling government. Although the Jesuits remained in high favor in the Imperial Court as interpreters or astronomers, the Qing YongZheng Emperor issued an edict in 1724 that ordered all missionaries except those occupying various offices at the Imperial Court to be exiled to Canton. His successor issued an edict that strictly prohibited teaching the Christian doctrine in China under the penalty of death. The persecution of Christians in China turned even more severe under the QiangLong Emperor, whose anti-Christian edicts reduced the number of Chinese Catholics to 200,000 by the end of the eighteenth century.

Choson had been under the umbrella of the Catholic Church since 1690, when Pope Alexander VIII, in an attempt to satisfy the Portuguese, created the Diocese of Beijing, (Zhili, Shangdong, Shanxi, Shaanxi, Henan, Liaodong, and Korea) and the Diocese of Nanjing, both under the Archbishop of Goa. In the wake of the Chinese suppression of the Catholic Church and despite the troubling shortage of priests in China, the Diocese of Beijing managed to dispatch a Chinese priest, Father Liu Fangji, to Choson in 1831. That same year, the Vatican removed Choson from the jurisdiction of the Bishop of Beijing and made it an independent diocese. Over the next five years, several French priests joined Father Liu's ministry, thereby creating the most formidable, and to the Choson government, the most challenging Catholic presence in Choson to date.

Father Barthelemy C. Brugiere, the former assistant to the Bishop of Siam, volunteered to serve as the new Bishop of Choson. In the spring of 1835, while travelling through Manchuria enroute to his new diocese, Father Brugiere took ill and died. Following close behind him however, was the French priest Father Pierre-Philibert Maubant. Late one night in November 1835, Father Maubant stealthily passed through the northern frontier guard zone and crossed the Yalu River, becoming the first European to set foot on Choson soil since the departure of the Dutch crew of de Sperwer in September 1666. With the able assistance of friendly citizens, Father Maubant slipped through the heavily-guarded city of Uiju by crawling through a storm drain in the surrounding granite walls. He reached the city of Seoul two days later. Father Maubant had committed the crime of "frontier crossing" and his life was now forfeit by law. Living in constant danger in the very shadow of the royal palace in Seoul, he remained hidden in the homes of converts and practiced mass in secret. Even under such conditions as these he made scores of new converts for the church.

Little more than a year later, Father Maubant was joined by a second French priest;  Father Jacques Honore Chanstan. Like his predecessor, Father Chanstan crossed the Yalu River in mid-winter, arriving at the city of Uiju in January 1837. Using a clever deception, he passed through the customs house disguised as a widower in mourning, a costume he later wore whenever he moved about in public. In the same year, still another French priest, Bishop Laurent Marie-Joseph Imbert, surreptitiously entered Choson. Copying the disguise first used by Father Chanstan, the three French priests regularly dressed in Choson mourning clothes and word huge, wide-brimmed hats that completely hid their faces. So attired, they went about their work, bringing several thousand new converts to the Catholic Church and maintaining contact with church authorities in China with the help of secret messages hidden among the diplomatic missions to Beijing.

Choson's newly arrived French priests were not left unmolested for long. In 1834, the Pungyang Cho clan, a powerful in-law family, displaced the Kim clan. As members and supporters of the anti-Catholic P'yokp'a faction, they quickly reinforced the already anti-Catholic tone in King Hongjong's royal court. The court appeared to be quite concerned about the presence of illegal foreigners in Choson, namely the missionaries. Mounting suspicions about the activities of Catholic missionaries prompted Chief State Councilor Cho In-yong to compose a stern edict that reaffirmed the existing ban on Catholicism and declared it to be a heterodox teaching. Councilor Cho's proclamation, an elaborate attempt to refute the "evil" teachings of Catholic theology, not only prohibited any further teaching of Catholicism, but also gave the government a free reign in expelling and persecuting Catholics. Unlike the more moderate policies of kings Chongjo and Yongjo, the attack against Catholicism and its followers under King Hongjong was a chief characteristic of the Confucian response. It also had the added benefit of undermining the position of the Kim clan, which was deemed "soft on Catholics."

Beginning on October 18, 1839, King Hongjong's royal court moved to restrain the expansion of Catholicism in Choson by posting its edict against the heterodox religion throughout Seoul and in every province. To ensure its message was not lost on the common people, the edict was posted in both Chinese characters and Korean script (Hangul). Beginning in 1801, each of Choson's religious persecutions forced members of the small Catholic community to spread from Seoul into the surrounding provinces - Kyonggi, Kangwon, Cholla, Chungchong and Hwanghae. In each case, the persecutions followed the believers. Every government attempt to quash the religion pushed it further underground, decentralized its structure, and led to the "hidden" practice of Catholicism among the common people. Confucian officials viewed the continued spread of the Catholic faith among the peasantry as subversive.

The Kihae Persecution of 1839 lasted nearly three years. Hundreds of Catholic converts, men, women and children alike, were arrested on orders from the royal court. Among the approximately eighty people executed, fifty were women;  a telling indicator of just how attractive the new religion had become to people dominated and oppressed in virtually every aspect of their social life. Numerous church leaders, including the three French priests Brugiere, Chanstan and Imbert, were arrested and publicly executed. The execution of the three priests had the atmosphere of a public holiday about it. Each man was tied to a pole that bore a banner on which his death sentence was painted. After hours of public torture and humiliation, each of the priests was beheaded. The actual number of Catholics arrested, executed or severely punished during this round of persecutions may well be much higher than official government records indicated, since local officials often persecuted Catholics at will without orders from the central government.

Despite government attempts to rid Choson of Catholicism, the Catholic Church continued to grow, mainly through the efforts of lay assistants to the French priests. Accompanying a priest or travelling alone, these men visited virtually every area where Christians were known to live, hearing confessions and carrying out the mass. The repeated persecutions also had the unintended effect of strengthening the church's presence and actually resulted in many martyrs being nominated for sainthood in Choson. In fact, Korea has produced more saints than any country in the world.

An equally significant development was the sending of three young Koreans to Portuguese Macao, the main base for Catholic missions in East Asia at the time. Two of men completed their studies for the priesthood and became Choson's first native priests:  Kim Tae-gon, known as Andrew Kim (1822-1846) and Choe Yang-op (1821-1861). Baptized at age 15, Kim Tae-gon was ordained in Shanghai by the French Bishop Jean Ferreol in 1845. Undeterred by the brutal religious persecutions underway in his native country, Father Kim, accompanied by Bishop Ferreol and Father Henri Daveluy, left Shanghai for Choson in September 1845. After a six-week voyage in a small boat, the men arrived in Choson and discovered that the horrors of the Kihae Persecution of 1839 were still vivid in people's minds.

Government authorities were still extremely hostile to the Catholic Church and the three priests were forced to carry out their work in utter secrecy. Even with this handicap however, their presence gave new life to the suppressed church in Choson. The following year, in June 1846, Father Kim was arrested while trying to make contact with a Chinese ship to send a letter to a French priest in China. Two months later, in August, Rear Admiral Cecille, commander of the French naval forces in China, arrived off the west coast with three warships to investigate the 1839 executions of French missionaries. Convinced there was a connection between Father Kim's activities and the arrival of French warships, the Choson government promptly executed eight converts in Seoul including Kim Tae-gon. The twenty-five-year-old martyr was canonized a saint by Pope John Paul II in May 1984.

One year later, in August 1847, two French warships under the command of Captain Lapierre returned to Choson. Captain Lapierre argued that the Chinese emperor's edict of 1844, guaranteeing toleration of Christians in all Chinese territories, applied to Choson as well and demanded satisfaction for the "murder" of French subjects in Choson. The Yi government rejected his argument outright and maintained that because the French priests had entered Choson illegally and engaged in spreading a proscribed alien faith, their execution was entirely justified. Before departing, Lapierre sent a letter to the High State Councilor in Seoul expressing the hope that Choson would tolerate Christianity and emphasized that a treaty with France would be advantageous in case Choson became involved in a war with a third power. Unimpressed by the French argument, the Yi government sent a detailed report of the execution of the French missionaries and the visits of Cecille and Lapierre to the Qing Board of Rites. It asked China to instruct the governor-general at Canton to dissuade the French from ever returning to Choson. The request was in vain however, since events were already underway in China and East Asia that made it virtually impossible for Choson, or China for that matter, to prevent further intrusions by Western powers.