궁동성당

History & origins

Gung-dong Parish was established on August 1, 1994. The Korean Catholic Encyclopedia's entry on Doryong-dong Parish records that Gung-dong Parish was separated as the Catholic community in Doryong-dong grew, and the Catholic Church directory in Korea gives the same foundation date. Soon after independence, a groundbreaking ceremony for the parish's own church was held on August 11.

Construction did not reach completion quickly. According to a 2002 Catholic Times report on the dedication, the structural frame was completed on October 30, 1998, but work was suspended for a time because of the effects of the Asian financial crisis. Construction later resumed, and finishing work was completed in January 2002, bringing the building project begun at the parish's foundation to its final stage after roughly seven and a half years.

During the long construction period, the parish community treated the building project as a shared work of faith. The contemporary report states that parishioners offered two million decades of the Rosary for the intention of building the church, continued a chain of prayer for two years, and joined in a parish-wide copying of Scripture. Even during the period when the economic crisis halted construction, prayer and the copying of the Bible were recorded as ways in which the community sustained its common commitment.

On April 7, 2002, the new church was dedicated in a Mass presided over by Bishop Joseph Kyeong Kap-ryong of Daejeon. At the time, the church stood on a 398-pyeong site with a total floor area of 712 pyeong and included the main church, a fellowship room that also served as a small chapel, a Eucharistic adoration chapel, and catechetical rooms. Its exterior was described as recalling an ark and was finished with copper cladding. The long building period from the 1994 groundbreaking to the 2002 dedication was also a time in which the new parish community and its church took shape together. The parish's early history thus traces the path from separation from Doryong-dong through a period of economic crisis to the completion of an independent church sustained by the community's prayer and participation.