Yangyang Sanctuary

History & origins

Fr. Timothy Yi Gwang-jae was ordained in 1936 and began his ministry as assistant priest at Pungsuwon Parish. In 1939 he was assigned to Yangyang Parish. He traveled extensively to serve mission stations across a broad territory, and after the northern part of Gangwon came under Communist rule, he helped clergy and religious cross to the South while choosing not to abandon his own faithful.

In June 1950, after hearing that Fr. Kim Bong-sik, who was serving in the North, had been arrested, Fr. Yi set out to assist Catholics in that area. He was captured by Communist forces and imprisoned in Wonsan. On October 9, 1950, he was shot in an air-raid shelter in Wonsan and died. The Diocese of Chuncheon remembers his death as the martyrdom of a shepherd who did not abandon the faithful even in wartime.

Parishioners in Yangyang began walking pilgrimages in his memory in 2000, and from 2009 the pilgrimage expanded to a diocesan event. Building on these years of remembrance, Bishop Lucas Kim Woon-hoe formally proclaimed Yangyang Catholic Church a diocesan shrine on September 17, 2017. The development of the shrine shows how the memory preserved by a local parish gradually became a place of pilgrimage and faith formation for the wider Diocese.