Choji Mission Station

History & origins

Choji Mission Station was established in 1959, one year after Ganghwa Parish was founded on the island. In the beginning, the home of the first mission-station leader, Peter Yi Wal-yong, was used as a temporary gathering place where Catholics celebrated local prayer services and maintained their community. It was a typical beginning for a rural mission station: Catholics living far from the parish church created a place of prayer within their own daily environment.

When the Apostolic Vicariate of Incheon was established in 1961, Ganghwa Parish came under the new jurisdiction. Father Patrick Patterson of the Maryknoll Missionaries, then an assistant priest at Ganghwa, acquired land in Choji-ri and built a hanok-style mission station of about 80 square meters. The building was blessed on November 14 of the same year. As Father Patterson also supported local development, youth education, a credit cooperative, and Young Christian Workers activities, conversions increased and the Choji Catholic community grew at one point to roughly forty households and about 120 believers.

The long-used hanok building was renovated in 1997 and has retained its present form since then. Choji continues today as a mission station under Onsu Parish, preserving an altar, tabernacle, statues, and other elements of Catholic worship within the traditional Korean structure. Its history shows how mission stations became practical centers of faith in rural parts of Ganghwa that were difficult to serve through parish churches alone.