Hanti Shrine

History & origins

The exact time when Catholics first settled at Hanti cannot be stated with certainty. The official chronology of Hanti Martyrs’ Shrine suggests that around 1815–1827, during the Ulhae and Jeonghae persecutions, family members of Catholics imprisoned at the Daegu provincial office may have begun living there in order to care for the prisoners and seek refuge. In 1838, the family of Joachim Kim Hyeon-sang moved to Hanti, and a report by Bishop Berneux in 1862 records that about forty people received the sacraments there.

During the Gyeongsin persecution of 1860, Elisabeth Yi Seon-i and her son Stephen Bae, who had fled to Hanti, were martyred. When the Byeongin persecution began in 1866, Catholics from Daegu, Sinnamugol, and other places again took refuge in Hanti. In the spring of 1868, government troops attacked the village, and a number of Catholics who refused to apostatize, including mission-station leader Carolus Jo, were martyred. The Catholic community did not disappear entirely afterward: Father Kim Bo-rok administered the sacraments at Hanti in 1882–1883, and by 1900 the community numbered more than eighty Catholics.

The organized commemoration of the martyrs developed in earnest in the latter half of the twentieth century. Pilgrimages began in 1967, and from 1983 regular Masses honoring the martyrs were accompanied by investigation and purchase of shrine land. Additional martyrs’ graves were identified in 1988 and 1991, and facilities such as the retreat house, information office, and spirituality center were gradually built. In 2000, Hanti was designated a Jubilee pilgrimage site for the plenary indulgence, and in 2016 the Hanti Pilgrimage Trail linking Catholic villages and missionary paths was opened, forming the pilgrimage network that exists today.