Hongju Shrine

History & origins

The exact date when Catholicism first reached the Hongju area is uncertain, but communities of believers formed rapidly in Naepo through the evangelizing activity associated with Yi Jon-chang, Louis Gonzaga, soon after the founding of the Catholic Church in Korea. Because Hongju was an administrative and military center, with the Hongju government office and military command located there, it became a center for the interrogation and punishment of Catholics arrested throughout the surrounding region once persecutions began. Peter Won Si-jang, arrested during the Sinhae Persecution and killed the following year, is remembered in the records as the first martyr of the Hongju area.

Persecution continued in several periods, and Catholics passed through prisons, government and military offices, marketplaces, and execution grounds, dying in different forms of punishment. The fact that the present pilgrimage route is spread across multiple sites reflects that history. Peter Won Si-jang, Francis Bang, Lawrence Pak Chwi-deuk, and Simon Hwang Il-gwang were beatified by Pope Francis in 2014 and came to be venerated as representative witnesses of the martyr history of Hongju.

In modern times, efforts were made to preserve and connect the martyrdom sites scattered through the urban area of Hongju. The shrine materials of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of Korea introduce the various sites and record that a memorial monument honoring the martyrs was erected in 2008 as the shrine was developed. This gave concrete form to the work of linking dispersed execution grounds and prison sites into a single landscape of Catholic memory.

Hongju Martyrs Shrine was thus formed not so much by creating one new sacred place as by identifying and connecting multiple historical locations of persecution within the city. Government offices, prisons, marketplaces, and execution sites that once belonged to ordinary civic and administrative life have become places of pilgrimage and prayer. That transformation itself is the way the history of the Hongju martyrs continues to be remembered in the faith life of the present.