신암 성당

History & origins

The Catholic community in the Sinam area was formed decades before the parish itself was established. The Korean Catholic Encyclopedia records that statistics from 1887 listed about thirty Catholics at the Dongsang mission station in this area, with the community gathering around the home of Kim Sang-yeon. As the number of Catholics increased, the mission station was moved to Singi-ri in 1904 and continued to serve as an important center of Catholic life in eastern Daegu.

In 1923, the community built a mission hall of about thirty pyeong, which was blessed by Bishop Demange. In 1933 the hall was renovated and a bell tower added, while the community was raised to quasi-parish status, allowing an assistant priest to stay there regularly for pastoral ministry. These changes marked the transition from a household-based mission community to a more permanent pastoral center.

Sinam became a full parish on December 20, 1945. Construction of a new church began in 1949 but was interrupted by the Korean War; the church was nevertheless completed in 1951 during the war. A kindergarten opened in 1960, and in 1965 a three-story parish hall was built to accommodate the kindergarten, catechetical rooms, a library, and a night school, broadening the parish’s educational and local activities beyond liturgical worship.

As the city expanded, Daehyeon and Hyomok parishes were separated from Sinam in 1977, followed by Keungogae Parish in 1981. Sinam itself continued to adapt to a growing congregation and pastoral needs, building a new church in October 1989 and a new convent in 1992. Its history therefore traces a development from a small late-nineteenth-century mission station into an urban parish from which several other communities in eastern Daegu emerged. Records also indicate that the Catholic population had grown to about one hundred by around 1900, showing that the community was already expanding steadily before the beginning of the twentieth century.