Shinseong Mission Station

History & origins

The Sinseong-ri area developed as a Catholic village where believers who had fled persecution and descendants of martyrs settled. As the community grew, Sinseong-ri Parish was established in June 1903 by separating the southern part of Suryu Parish, with Fr. Kim Seung-yeon (Augustine) serving as the first pastor. This shows that Sinseong was once not merely a mission station but a parish center responsible for pastoral care in the surrounding area.

After the second pastor arrived in 1907, the parish’s facilities were developed more fully. Construction began in the spring of 1909, producing a tiled-roof church, a rectory, and meeting space; by 1914, a stone wall had also been completed. The hanok rectory built in 1909 was later used as the mission-station building, while traces of the old meeting house and ancillary facilities continued to preserve the physical memory of early parish life.

Although the parish center eventually moved elsewhere, the buildings and remains at Sinseong survived as important evidence of local Catholic history. The former rectory was designated a Jeollabuk-do Cultural Heritage Material in 2002 and restored in 2003. The Diocese of Jeonju and Jeongeup City now present the site in the context of pilgrimage and cultural heritage because Sinseong Mission Station preserves more than a present-day mission function: it conveys the life of an early twentieth-century rural parish and Catholic village.