A widowed Korean mother who died in a Seoul prison in 1839, remembered alongside her own daughter Saint Magdalena Cho among the Korean Martyrs.

Saint Catharina Yi was a Korean widow who died in a Seoul prison in September 1839, during a persecution that swept through Korea’s Catholic communities that year. She was the mother of Saint Magdalena Cho, meaning that her martyrdom and her daughter’s were remembered together as a family’s shared witness rather than as separate, unconnected events. Catharina was beatified in 1925 and canonized in 1984 as one of the 103 Korean Martyrs raised to sainthood by Pope John Paul II.

Quick Facts

• Died: September 1839, Seoul Prison, Korea
• Beatified: 1925 | Canonized: 1984
• Venerated as: Martyr; mother of Saint Magdalena Cho

Who Was Saint Catharina Yi?

Catharina Yi had already lost her husband by the time persecution reached her household, and she faced her own death in a Seoul prison in 1839 as a widow rather than as a young convert acting alone. Her daughter, later canonized as Saint Magdalena Cho, shared in the same fate, so that Catharina’s story is inseparable from her role as a mother who saw the faith she had passed on cost her child’s life as well as her own. No further biographical detail beyond this survives.

Historical Setting

The year 1839 brought one of the harshest of Korea’s anti-Catholic crackdowns, remembered as the Kihae persecution, carried out under a regency government determined to root out what it treated as a subversive foreign creed. Whole families were often swept up together in these arrests, since Korean Catholicism had grown largely through households and kinship networks rather than through parish structures imposed from outside, making a mother’s arrest and a daughter’s arrest frequently part of the very same event.

Why the Church Remembers Saint Catharina Yi

Catharina Yi is remembered as part of a mother-daughter martyrdom, a pairing that speaks directly to how the Korean Church survived and spread: through family transmission of belief across generations, sustained even when that transmission carried a mother’s worst fear, watching her own child suffer for the faith she had taught her.

Canonization and Feast Day

Catharina was beatified in 1925 and canonized in 1984 by Pope John Paul II in Seoul, together with the wider group of 103 Korean Martyrs that includes her daughter Magdalena Cho.

What Catholics Can Learn Today

Her story asks something specific of parents in the faith: that passing belief on to one’s children is itself a serious act, one Catharina did not shrink from continuing even to the point of watching, or perhaps preceding, her daughter into death for it.

A Prayer to Saint Catharina Yi

Saint Catharina Yi, widowed mother who taught your daughter the faith that both of you would die for, pray for parents handing on belief to their children today. Give them your courage to keep teaching what matters most, whatever it may one day cost. Amen.

Sources

• Vatican.va (canonization of the Korean Martyrs, 1984)
• Roman Martyrology
• EWTN