Saint Andrew Kim Taegon

Christianity reached Korea, John Paul II said at the canonization, "by means of books brought from China." ³ Korea admitted almost no contact with the outside world, but an embassy went to Beijing every year, and educated Koreans used it to bring back whatever books they could. ²⁸ Vatican News dates the first study of Christian writings to around 1777. ¹ In 1784 one of those scholars went to Beijing and was baptized; the 1908 encyclopedia names him as Ni-seung-houn, baptized Peter, and says that on his return he baptized his companions. ³⁸

John Paul II called the result "a community unique in the history of the Church by reason of the fact that it was founded entirely by lay people." ³ Pope Francis put it the same way in Seoul in 2014: the faith "was not brought to the shores of Korea through missionaries," but entered "through the hearts and minds of the Korean people themselves." ⁶ The encyclopedia says a Chinese priest, Father Jacques Tjyou, was sent around 1794 and found about 4,000 faithful waiting for him. ⁸ Franciscan Media, which puts his arrival a dozen years after that first study of the books, says none of them had ever seen a priest. ² He was put to death on May 31, 1801. ⁸

Paul Chong Hasang, the lay apostle whose name the feast carries alongside Andrew's, was the nephew of one of the most noted Korean philosophers of his day. ¹ He was seven when his father and older brother were martyred. ¹ He became a government interpreter, which let him travel to China, and in Beijing he spoke for the Korean Christians, writing to the pope to ask for an apostolic vicariate to care for them. ¹

The sources disagree on the date. Vatican News says that Pope Gregory XVI did as Paul asked in 1825. ¹ The 1908 encyclopedia dates the vicariate to September 9, 1831, and says it was entrusted to the Society of Foreign Missions of Paris. ⁸ John Paul II recalled that after years of pleading the Korean Christians welcomed the first French missionaries in 1836. ³

Paul was tried in 1839, and handed the judge a written defense of the faith. The judge, Vatican News records, told him, "You are right in what you have written, but the king has forbidden this religion, and it is your duty to renounce it." Paul answered, "I have told you that I am a Christian. I will be one until my death." ¹ Franciscan Media says he was a married man and died that year at the age of 45. ² The same persecution took the French bishop Imbert and his two priests. ⁸

Andrew Kim was the son of Christian converts. ² His father, Ignatius Kim, was martyred in the persecution of 1839. ² Pope Francis, speaking to Korean pilgrims in 2023, said that his grandfather was martyred as well and that his mother "was forced to live as a beggar." ⁵

He was baptized at 15, and went to the seminary in Macao, China, a journey Vatican News puts at 1,200 miles and Franciscan Media at 1,300. ¹² Francis noted that while he studied theology there he "had to witness the horrors of the Opium Wars." ⁵ After six years, Franciscan Media says, he managed to get back into Korea through Manchuria. ²

Francis devoted a general audience in May 2023 to two episodes from these years. The first was how Andrew met other Christians where it was forbidden to be one: discreetly, after a sign agreed in advance, with a question asked under his breath, "Are you a disciple of Jesus?" ⁴ The second came while he was still a seminarian trying to find a way to bring foreign missionaries in secretly. He walked through the snow without eating until he collapsed, at risk of freezing, and then heard a voice telling him, "Get up and keep walking!" ⁴

The same year he returned through Manchuria, Andrew crossed the Yellow Sea to Shanghai and was ordained a priest there. ² Vatican News says the French missionary bishop who ordained him "was filled with joy to see the zeal of this young Christian." ¹ The 1908 encyclopedia records that in 1845 a new bishop, Ferréol, entered Korea, bringing with him "the first Corean priest, André Kim." ⁸

Back home, Andrew was given the task of arranging for more missionaries to enter by a water route that would get past the border patrol. ² Vatican News preserves his words to the Christians he served: "We have received baptism… and the honor of being called Christians. Yet what good will this do us if we are Christians in name only and not in fact?" ¹

He was arrested, tortured, and beheaded at the Han River near Seoul. ² He was 25. ¹⁷ When the Korean Church kept the bicentenary of his birth in 2021, it took as the theme of the jubilee a question his interrogators had put to him, "Are you a Catholic faithful?" Vatican News reports his answer as "Yes, I am a Catholic." ⁷

Before he died, according to Vatican News, he spoke to his executioners: "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!" ¹

His cause was opened in Rome, together with those of the three French martyrs of 1839 and other Korean martyrs, eighty-two in all, by a decree of September 24, 1857. ⁸ Persecution went on. John Paul II counted some ten thousand Korean martyrs in less than a century, and Franciscan Media dates religious freedom in Korea to 1883. ²³

On May 6, 1984, at Youido Place in Seoul, John Paul II canonized the Korean Martyrs: "true sons and daughters of your nation," he said, "joined by a number of missionaries from other lands." ³ They ranged "from the thirteen-year-old Peter Yu to the seventy-two-year-old Mark Chong." ³ Franciscan Media counts 47 women and 45 men among the lay martyrs; the Vatican News report of 2021 describes the 103 as "including 15 women." ²⁷

Thirty years later Pope Francis came to Korea, visited the house at Solmoe where Andrew was born, and in Seoul beatified 124 more martyrs, whose names, he said, "now stand alongside those of the holy martyrs Andrew Kim Taegon, Paul Chong Hasang and companions." ⁵⁶ On September 16, 2023, the anniversary of Andrew's death, Francis received Korean pilgrims who had come to Rome for the blessing of a statue of him, installed in an outside niche of Saint Peter's Basilica. ⁵

None of the sources consulted for this page names a patronage for Andrew Kim Taegon, and so the page does not state one. Vatican News and Franciscan Media present him as Korea's first priest and one of its martyrs, and stop there. ¹²

In 2023 Pope Francis entrusted to Andrew "the dream of peace of the Korean Peninsula," and asked the intercession of Andrew and the Korean Martyrs for the pilgrims in front of him, "that they may protect you and show you the way." ⁵

His feast is September 20, kept together with Saint Paul Chong Hasang and their companions. Vatican News and Franciscan Media both list them on that date, as does the Vatican News report on the 2021 bicentenary. ¹²⁷

That is not the day he died. Franciscan Media and the 2021 Vatican News report give his death as September 16, 1846, and Pope Francis met Korean pilgrims on September 16, 2023, calling it "the day of the martyrdom of Saint Andrew Kim Taegon, 177 years ago." ²⁵⁷

The faith Andrew died for was handed to him by lay people. There had been no priest in Korea when it began, and in its first half century, John Paul II said, it had only two priests from China, "and these only for a time." ²³ Pope Francis asked the obvious question in his 2023 catechesis: "Would we be capable of something like that?" ⁴ A priest of their own was what those lay Christians had pleaded for and written to Rome about, and Andrew was the first of them. ¹²³

The question he whispered to strangers, "Are you a disciple of Jesus?", was short because it had to be. ⁴ Francis read it as Andrew's summary of what a Christian is. It is also a question a person can put to himself, in the same few words, with nobody else listening.

The snow story is a story about falling. Francis told it to make the point that saints fall too, and that what matters is getting back up and going on. ⁴ Andrew did go on, and it led to the Han River, shortly after his ordination. ²⁵ His father and grandfather had died the same way, and his mother was left to beg. ⁵ Nothing in the sources makes that cost smaller than it was.

He told the Christians around him that baptism was worth little if they were Christians "in name only and not in fact." ¹ In Korea in 1846, Vatican News says, being a Christian in fact meant being ready at any moment to witness to Christ with one's life. ¹ He told his executioners that his immortal life was about to begin. ¹