Martyr Blessed Jeong Chan-mun's Tomb

History & origins

Antonio Jeong Chan-mun was born in 1822 into a yangban family in Jungchon at Heoyu-gogae, Jinju, in Gyeongsang Province. He learned about Catholicism from his wife, who had been baptized before him, studied the faith, and entered the Church in 1863 at the age of forty-one. During the Byeongin Persecution, he was arrested by officers in the autumn of 1866. Relatives and a local official urged him to renounce the faith, but he refused. After twenty-five days in the Jinju prison and repeated severe punishments, he died on the night of January 25, 1867. The Catholic Bishops' Conference biography records his manner of martyrdom as death from beating.

After his martyrdom, his body was buried near his home, but over time the exact location of the grave survived largely through oral memory. In 1947, Father Bernard Seo Jeong-do, pastor of Munsan Parish, began investigating local accounts of a supposed “headless grave.” On March 29, 1948, parish youth located a grave on the slope of Heoyu-gogae with the help of an elderly resident's testimony. On May 31, Father Seo reopened the grave in a more formal manner, placed the remains in a new coffin, moved them slightly uphill, and erected a monument.

The present cemetery was created later. Father John Jeong Sam-gyu of Okbong-dong Parish organized a committee for the veneration of the martyr with neighboring parishes and secured land for a proper cemetery. In October 1975, the martyr's remains were transferred to the present site, and Sabong Mission Station was later built in front of the cemetery. The pilgrimage site is therefore significant not simply as an original burial place but as the result of a long effort by the local Church to investigate, recover, preserve, and honor the memory of a martyr that might otherwise have been lost.

Antonio Jeong Chan-mun was among the 124 Korean martyrs beatified by Pope Francis at Gwanghwamun in Seoul on August 16, 2014, as Paul Yun Ji-chung and 123 Companions. Through that beatification, his cemetery became not only a local place for honoring a martyr but also a pilgrimage site connected with a Blessed publicly venerated by the Catholic Church in Korea. The history of the cemetery therefore preserves both the martyrdom itself and the later Church's effort to recover a fading memory, verify it, and hand it on as a heritage of faith.