Daeyeon Catholic Church

History & origins

The beginnings of the Daeyeon Catholic community can be traced to 1960, when Father Francis (범덕례), a Conventual Franciscan missionary, secured land for a church in Daeyeon-dong and began preparing a temporary church. According to a local historical report, Catholics gathered there for their first Mass on February 23, 1961, and around that time the Daeyeon community began to take shape as an independent parish of the Diocese of Busan. The diocese’s celebration of the parish’s sixtieth anniversary in 2021 also supports 1961 as the reference year for its establishment.

The early community soon undertook the construction of a permanent church. Work began in March 1962, and a completion ceremony was held in December of the same year, with missionaries and parishioners contributing together to the creation of the church. The formation of Daeyeon Parish in this period was closely connected with the early missionary work of the Conventual Franciscans in Korea. The movement from a temporary church to an independent parish with its own church building formed the community’s first institutional base.

Over the following decades, several generations accumulated a shared history of faith in the parish. In June 2021, Bishop Son Sam-seok presided at a Mass of thanksgiving for the sixtieth anniversary of the parish. According to the Diocese of Busan, parishioners prepared for the anniversary by offering 317,150 decades of the rosary, and the whole parish also presented a handwritten copy of the entire Old and New Testaments before the altar. A photographic exhibition showing the parish’s past was held as part of the commemoration.

The record from the securing of land and preparation of a temporary church in 1960, through the first Mass and the parish’s beginning in 1961, the construction of the church in 1962, and the communal remembrance of the sixtieth anniversary in 2021 presents Daeyeon’s history as an accumulation of faith across generations. A community first shaped through the work of a missionary and the participation of local Catholics grew into a parish able to remember and hand on its own history; this is the principal documented trajectory of Daeyeon Parish.