Sangju Okteo Martyrs' Shrine

History & origins

Sangju Okteo is traditionally identified with the site of the government prison of Sangju during the Joseon period. The Diocese of Andong’s shrine guide suggests that a prison was established there around 1408, when the Gyeongsang provincial administration was based in Sangju. During the Catholic persecutions of the late Joseon era, Catholics arrested in northwestern Gyeongsang were confined there, making Sangju one of the administrative nodes through which persecution was carried out.

During the Jeonghae Persecution of 1827, Catholics from places such as Jatgol, Meongemok, and Aengmudang were brought to the prison. During the Byeongin Persecution beginning in 1866, Catholics from Hansil, Yeowumok, and other communities also passed through it. Some were executed in Sangju, while others were transferred to Daegu or Jeonju and later martyred. The diocesan account also notes cases in which executions were carried out first and reported afterward, under the practice known as seoncham-hugye.

Among the martyrs connected with the prison, Peter Sin Tae-bo and Barbara Choe Joi were transferred to Jeonju, while Paul Bak Gyeong-hwa, Andrew Bak Sa-ui, Andrew Kim Sa-geon, and John the Apostle Yi Yun-il were transferred to Daegu before their martyrdom. These six were among the Korean martyrs beatified during the Mass celebrated by Pope Francis in Seoul on August 16, 2014.

On August 24 of the same year, the Diocese of Andong formally proclaimed and blessed Sangju Okteo as a diocesan martyr shrine. A place once associated with imprisonment and coercion was thereby transformed into a place of remembrance and prayer for the martyrs. The shrine now directly links the landscape of nineteenth-century persecution with the Church’s twenty-first-century commemoration of those witnesses. The shrine designation of 2014 took on particular meaning because it followed the beatification held earlier that same month. After the martyrs connected with the prison were publicly proclaimed Blessed, the diocese formally established the Sangju site through which they had been imprisoned or transferred as a place of pilgrimage. This sequence shows that Okteo became a shrine in order to connect documentary accounts of the martyrs with the memory of a concrete place, rather than simply to preserve an old administrative site.