Cheonan Ssangyong 3-dong Catholic Church

History & origins

The historical record of Buldang-dong Parish traces the community separated from Ssangyong-dong Parish in January 2004 to the present Cheonan Ssangyong 3-dong Parish. The official Catholic directory gives January 8, 2004, as the date of parish establishment. At the time, the Church was responding to new-town development and population growth in western Cheonan by creating relatively small parishes of around a thousand faithful and experimenting with shared pastoral cooperation among neighboring parishes; the Ssangyong-Buldang area became one of the places where this approach was tried.

Soon after its establishment, the community used the second floor of a commercial building as a temporary church. Parish boundaries in the area continued to change quickly, with the creation of Buldang-dong Parish in 2005 and the line of development that led to the present Cheonan Ssangyong 2-dong Parish in 2006. Even amid this rapid subdivision, the Ssangyong 3-dong community proceeded with plans for a permanent church and broke ground in June 2006.

Construction was completed a little over a year later, and on November 12, 2007, the new church was blessed in a liturgy presided over by Bishop Lazarus You Heung-sik. The Catholic Times described it as a permanent home secured three years and ten months after the parish had been established. The sequence reflects a period in which the pastoral map of western Cheonan was being reshaped in response to fast urban growth, while the new parish moved from temporary quarters to a stable church of its own.