About this place
Bibong Mission Station is a Catholic mission station under Cheongyang Parish in the Diocese of Daejeon, continuing a rural Catholic community in Rokpyeong-ri, Bibong-myeon, Cheongyang. The diocesan bulletin identifies it as “Bibong Mission Station of Cheongyang Parish” and notes that the community still remains, while many local Catholics attend Mass at Cheongyang Parish.
A distinctive feature of Bibong is that today's small mission community is connected with memories of a Catholic village dating from around the persecution era. Catholics in the Rokpyeong-ri area lived around pottery workshops, and the mission building, Marian statue, and bell preserve something of the religious landscape of a rural Catholic settlement.
Bibong is therefore not an independent parish but a small local community closely linked to Cheongyang Parish. Visitors can encounter both its present mission-station life and traces of a Chungcheong rural Catholic village in which livelihood and faith developed together.
History & origins
The Catholic community of Rokpyeong-ri in Bibong-myeon is described as having formed around pottery workshops from the period surrounding the persecutions. Diocesan records list it in 1909 as a mission station under the pastoral care of Father Gombert of Geumsari Parish, with 57 Catholics at that time. Pottery production remained one of the community's local livelihoods into the late 1970s.
Mission-station life was interrupted by the Korean War but resumed around 1952. Around 1955, the community president, John Baek Yong-seok, repaired a wooden outbuilding at his home and used it as the mission chapel, allowing worship and community gatherings to continue even without a large dedicated facility.
Over time pottery production declined and ended around 1990, but the memory of both the old kiln sites and the Catholic community remained. Around 2016 the mission station was repaired inside and out, a bell was mounted near the village road, and a statue of the Virgin Mary was installed beneath the eaves.
The history of Bibong Mission Station therefore joins together the life of a persecution-era Catholic village, the pottery trade, interruption and recovery after war, and years of worship in a modest house. The overlap of faith and livelihood within the same rural settlement is one of the defining features of its history.
Korean Catholic Places Encyclopedia
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- 한국천주교주교회의 온라인 주소록
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Daejeon Diocese (Diocese of Daejeon)
Official website: http://www.djcatholic.or.kr
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