Sunseong Catholic Church

History & origins

Preparations for Sunseong Parish began before the parish was formally established. According to the Catholic Times, local Catholics began acquiring land near the former Sunseong Mission Station in 2008 and used a temporary prefabricated church while preparing a place for a future parish community. This was the period in which the existing mission-station community laid the foundations for its development into a parish.

In January 2015 the Diocese of Daejeon formally established Sunseong Parish and identified Sinhapdeok as its mother parish. Several mission-station communities, including Sunseong and Myeoncheon, were brought together within the new parish, and Father Jeong Seong-yong, who had been serving at Sinhapdeok, became the first pastor. Once the parish had been formed, creating a permanent church where the previously scattered faithful could gather became a central task.

In 2016 a rectory and an education building were completed first at the new site, and construction of the church followed the next year. Records describe parishioners participating directly in the work and completing the church in roughly one hundred days. The new building, with a red-brick exterior and pointed tower inspired in part by the atmosphere of the historic Gongseri Catholic Church, linked the older church-building tradition of the Naepo region with a contemporary rural parish.

With the dedication of the new church on March 10, 2018, Sunseong Parish obtained a central sacred space where communities that had long been divided among mission stations could gather together. The chronology shows that Sunseong Catholic Church was not merely the result of a construction project but the culmination of years of preparation and lay participation through which mission-station communities grew into a parish.