Hapdeok Catholic Church

History & origins

The roots of Hapdeok Parish go back to the period when the Church in the Naepo region was being rebuilt after the persecutions. Soon after the founding of the Catholic Church in Korea, Naepo became home to large communities of believers, shaped in part by the evangelizing activity of Yi Jon-chang, Louis Gonzaga, but those communities suffered heavily through repeated persecutions. As Catholic communities formed again after the persecutions, Yangchon Parish was established in 1890. It became the direct predecessor of present-day Hapdeok Parish.

In 1898 the parish acquired the present site near Hapdeokji and began constructing a Korean-style rectory and church. The buildings were completed the following year, the parish moved there, and its name was changed to Hapdeok Parish. As the parish had served a very broad part of Naepo, other parishes, including Yesan and Dangjin, were later separated from it as the pastoral structure of the region became more differentiated.

The present church was built during the pastorate of Father Perrin and was completed and dedicated on October 9, 1929. The Romanesque-style brick church with its two bell towers became an architectural symbol of Hapdeok. After Sinhapdeok Parish was separated in 1960, the older parish was known for a time as “Old Hapdeok.” According to Dangjin City, the name Hapdeok Catholic Church was restored in 1997, and on July 28, 1998 the church was designated Chungcheongnam-do Monument No. 145.

These changes show how one parish developed from a missionary center for the broad Naepo region into a mother parish from which several other parishes were formed, and later into a community preserving a historic church and the memory of the martyrs. The surviving church, old rectory, and traces of nearby Catholic villages together reveal successive layers of Naepo Catholic history from the parish’s late-nineteenth-century establishment into the modern era.