St. Kim Beom-woo Martyr Shrine

History & origins

Thomas Kim Beom-u was baptized in 1784 and then offered his own home in Myeongnyebang, Seoul, as a place for gatherings of believers. There, people who had accepted the Catholic faith met regularly to learn doctrine and pray, making the house an important center of the early Catholic community in Korea. Diocese of Busan materials describe Kim Beom-u, a middle-class interpreter, as an active participant in the spread of the faith during this formative period.

In 1785, Kim Beom-u was arrested when the Myeongnyebang gathering was discovered in the incident known as the Eulsa Chujo crackdown. The aristocratic believers who had been arrested with him were released, but Kim was tortured and exiled to Danjang in Miryang. Even in exile he prayed and taught catechism to those who came to him. His torture wounds worsened, and he died on September 14, 1787, at the age of thirty-seven. The Diocese of Busan remembers his death as martyrdom.

The work of identifying his long-obscured grave began in earnest in 1987 with the establishment of the Diocese of Busan's committee for the promotion of the martyrs. Investigators traced descendants and genealogies, located the grave, and excavated it in 1989. Teeth recovered from the grave were analyzed by dental departments at Pusan National University and Yonsei University and identified as belonging to a man in his late thirties. Genealogical evidence, remains, field investigation, and old documents were then considered together, and in 1992 a related scholarly study was published, providing an academic foundation for the inquiry toward beatification.

The burial site was later developed into a place of pilgrimage. On September 20, 2011, the Marian Grotto Church commemorating Thomas Kim Beom-u was dedicated at the grave site together with a Mass for the feast of the martyrs. In this way, the lay faith of the eighteenth-century Korean Church, the memory of persecution, the historical research of the late twentieth century, and the development of a twenty-first-century shrine became connected in one place.