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About this place
Jeongnam Catholic Church is the church of Jeongnam Parish in the Hwaseong District of the First Vicariate of the Diocese of Suwon. With St. John the Baptist as its patron, it is the center of a rural parish where Catholics scattered among the villages of Jeongnam-myeon in Hwaseong gather for Mass, the sacraments, catechesis, and prayer. Unlike other parts of Hwaseong that have undergone rapid urbanization, the area retains a strong rural character, making the parish’s role in linking Catholics across a broad territory especially important.
The diocesan record for the parish’s fiftieth anniversary notes that Jeongnam has continued faith formation, prayer, and community life while experiencing the population decline and aging common to rural areas. Today’s Jeongnam Catholic Church is a place where a parish that grew from a long mission-station tradition continues the faith locally, enabling Catholics from different villages and generations to gather for liturgy and care for one another. Official anniversary records of Jeongnam Parish treat the continuation of faith formation and prayer as an important task even as the rural population declines and parishioners grow older. For this reason, the significance of Jeongnam Catholic Church lies less in the size of the local population than in providing a durable communal base where dispersed Catholics can gather regularly, sustain their faith, and care for one another.
History & origins
The roots of Jeongnam Parish reach back several decades before its establishment as a parish, to the Catholic community of Sin-ri Mission Station. Official diocesan sources, however, record different starting years. A 2015 fortieth-anniversary account says the community began in 1937 as a mission station of Wangnim Parish, while the 2025 fiftieth-anniversary record identifies the 1940 Sin-ri Mission Station as the beginning. The safest understanding is therefore that the community took root in the late 1930s or around 1940.
After continuing for many years as a mission community, Jeongnam was established as an independent parish on May 23, 1975. Serving a broad rural territory, the parish took responsibility for bringing Catholics from several villages into one community and later developed its parish identity under the patronage of St. John the Baptist.
The parish maintained its community through rural depopulation and aging, marking its fortieth anniversary in 2015 and its fiftieth in 2025. Although the two commemorative records differ on the exact year when the mission station began, they agree on the larger sequence: a community rooted in Sin-ri grew into a parish in 1975. The history of Jeongnam Catholic Church can thus be understood as the long maturation of a small rural mission community into an established parish in the Hwaseong countryside. After establishment as a parish, the community steadily strengthened the foundations for faith formation and prayer in ways suited to a rural pastoral setting. The fortieth-anniversary record refers to the development of educational and parish spaces, while the fiftieth-anniversary account emphasizes the community’s continued Christian life amid population decline. This shows that Jeongnam’s history has been shaped less by rapid outward expansion than by the work of sustaining a small community across a broad rural area and handing on the faith between generations. The two anniversary celebrations also gave the parish occasions to recognize the long continuity from mission station to parish.
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Suwon Diocese (Diocese of Suwon)
Official website: http://www.casuwon.or.kr
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