Gon's Chapel Mission Station

History & origins

The history of Catholic life in Gonuigol begins with the memory of a Catholic village that predates the formal mission-station record. The Diocese of Wonju pilgrimage route says that Catholics who gathered in this mountain area after persecution formed a community around 1847 and introduces Gonuigol, together with Baeron, Pungsuwon, and Seoji Village, as one of the diocese's old Catholic villages. The Guide to the Catholic Church in Korea records 1900 as the establishment year of Gonuigol Mission Station. The two sources therefore point to different stages: the formation of a Catholic village and the later formal establishment of the mission station.

The diocesan pilgrimage route states that the present mission-station building was constructed in 1925 and remodeled in 1988. The history of the building is a physical trace of the community's long continuation of mission-station life in the same area.

The Catholic village also functioned as a place of education as well as religious practice. According to the Catholic Encyclopedia's history of Hakseong-dong Parish, Father Yi Bo-hwan of Hoengseong Parish established a night school at Gonuigol Mission Station in 1933, providing a place for catechesis and basic education. It is an example of how a mountain mission station could serve not only as a setting for Mass and mission-station devotions but also for the learning of local residents and Catholics.

Pastoral jurisdiction changed several times as the diocesan and parish structure developed. The encyclopedia records that in 1965 Gonuigol was transferred from Hoengseong Parish to Hakseong-dong Parish, returned to Hoengseong in 1970, and was transferred again to Hakseong-dong in 1977. As parishes in the Wonju area were later divided and newly established, Gonuigol eventually came to be registered under Yeongsan Parish, its present mother parish.

Gonuigol's history is therefore best understood not as a single foundation event but as a sequence of the formation of a post-persecution mountain Catholic village, the formal settlement of a mission station, educational activity, and repeated changes in pastoral jurisdiction. The surviving mission station testifies that a Catholic community has continued in the same locality through those changes.