A Korean widow executed at Seoul’s Small West Gate in 1839 during one of Korea’s severe persecutions of the Catholic faith.

Perpetua Hong Kŭm-ju was a Korean Catholic laywoman, a married widow, executed at the Small West Gate of Seoul on September 26, 1839, at about thirty-four years old, during the Gihae persecution, one of several major nineteenth-century Korean crackdowns on Christianity.

Quick Facts

• Died: September 26, 1839, Small West Gate, Seoul, South Korea (about age 34)
• Venerated as: Lay martyr
• Beatified: 1925
• Canonized: 1984

Who Was Saint Perpetua Hong Kŭm-ju?

Perpetua Hong Kŭm-ju was a Korean Catholic laywoman, married and widowed, who belonged to one of the underground Catholic communities that had grown in Korea since the faith first arrived there through Korean scholars’ own study of Chinese Catholic texts in the late eighteenth century, decades before any resident missionary bishop was present in the country.

Historical Setting

The Joseon dynasty treated Catholicism as a dangerous foreign ideology that undermined Confucian social order, and the 1839 Gihae persecution was one of several nineteenth-century waves of arrest and execution that killed both Korean lay Catholics and the small number of French missionary priests then secretly serving the underground Church there.

Why the Church Remembers Saint Perpetua Hong Kŭm-ju

Perpetua Hong Kŭm-ju is remembered as one of the many Korean laywomen who sustained the Catholic faith in their own households and communities through decades without resident clergy, and who paid for that fidelity with execution when the state periodically moved to crush the underground Church.

Canonization and Feast Day

Perpetua Hong Kŭm-ju was beatified in 1925 and canonized by Pope John Paul II in Seoul on May 6, 1984, together with the broader group of 103 Korean Martyrs. Their shared feast is kept on September 20.

What Catholics Can Learn Today

The Korean Catholic Church’s earliest growth, driven by laypeople studying and passing on the faith among themselves before any priest arrived, and then sustained by women like Perpetua through recurring persecution, is a striking reminder of how much of the Church’s life can be carried forward by ordinary believers rather than clergy alone.

A Prayer to Saint Perpetua Hong Kŭm-ju

Saint Perpetua Hong Kŭm-ju, widow who kept the faith alive in a Church without priests, pray for lay Catholics today who carry the faith forward in their families and communities, often quietly and without recognition. Amen.

Sources

• Vatican.va, canonization homily of Pope John Paul II, May 6, 1984
• Roman Martyrology, September 20, Korean Martyrs
• New Advent, Catholic Encyclopedia, “Korea”