Photo: CNS/Paul Haring
POPE Francis placed 124 Korean martyrs on the last step toward sainthood in a beatification Mass on August 16 that brought elation to the 800,000 people in attendance.
The sun was searing as Bishop Francis Ahn Myong-ok of Masan, president of the commission for the beatification, asked the pope to pronounce the martyrs blessed.
After hearing a brief collective biography of 124 of the original founders of the Korean Catholic Church, Pope Francis pronounced the formula of beatification.
With his words, trumpets blared and a huge swath depicting a watercolour of the newly blessed martyrs in heaven was unfurled on the side of a large building facing the square where the faithful gathered.
Pope Francis celebrated the Mass on August 16 during his five-day trip to South Korea, his first pastoral visit to Asia.
“It was very great to see Papa Francis,” Sophia Moon, 26, said.
“He was very touching to us because in Korea there have been very hard times and there were (people who became martyrs).”
The 124 were killed for their beliefs, setting off a 100-year period in the 18th and 19th centuries when the Korean government went after about 10,000 faithful who pledged filial piety to God, not the king of Joseon. Among this group was Paul Yun Ji-Chung, the very first Korean to be executed for his faith after he buried his mother using Catholic rites that completely went against the norms of the heavily Confucian society.
“So often we today can find our faith challenged by the world, and in countless ways we are asked to compromise our faith, to water down the radical demands of the Gospel and to conform to the spirit of this age,” Pope Francis said.
“Yet the martyrs call out to us to put Christ first and to see all else in this world in relation to him and his eternal kingdom. They challenge us to think about what, if anything, we ourselves would be willing to die for.”
Seyeon Jeong, 26, said she had an 18th-century ancestor who “actually sacrificed himself as a Catholic” but was not among the newly blessed.
“I was born a Catholic and I have been living as a Catholic, but through this Mass I can actually realise the meaning, I mean the full meaning of what the sacrifice meant here,” she said. “I could actually feel my ancestor’s spirit.”
Pope Francis credited the martyrs with showing the “importance of charity in the life of faith,” since their belief in the “equal dignity of all the baptised” led them to challenge the “rigid social structures of their day.”
CNS
