Shin An Woo Shrine

History & origins

According to Archdiocese of Daegu sources, Catholics gathered at Sinnamugol during the era of persecution and formed a Catholic village. The official shrine guide says that believers who took refuge there during the Eulhae Persecution of 1815 formed a community. The same archdiocesan sources describe the visits of Father Chastan, Father Thomas Choe Yang-eop, and Bishop Daveluy as conjectural, so those visits should not be presented as established facts.

A major turning point in the evangelization of Gyeongsang Province came with the settlement of Father Achille Robert of the Paris Foreign Missions Society. According to an archbishop’s homily, after beginning itinerant missionary work in Gyeongsang and neighboring regions in 1882, Robert established a residence at Sinnamugol in 1885. This made Sinnamugol the site of the first parish in Gyeongsang and a missionary base for the later establishment of a parish in Daegu. He also opened Yeonhwa School there for education and evangelization, and other missionaries continued pastoral work in the area after him.

After Robert moved to Saebanggol in 1887 and entered Daegu in 1891, Sinnamugol became a mission station without a resident priest, and the local community eventually declined. In the 1970s, priests of Waegwan Abbey of the Order of St. Benedict played a leading role in developing the site as a shrine, and further work was carried out in the 1980s around the bicentenary of the Catholic Church in Korea through the archdiocese and Sindong Parish. During this process, the remains of the martyr Elizabeth Yi Seon-i were transferred to Sinnamugol and enshrined there.

On May 2, 2019, the newly built Sinnamugol shrine church was dedicated. The development from a persecuted Catholic village to a missionary base, later a mission station, and finally a developed shrine shows how Sinnamugol preserves the memory of the early missionary history that shaped the Archdiocese of Daegu.