Jiseopo Church

History & origins

The modern formation of Jisepo Parish can be traced in the personnel records of the Diocese of Masan and in the Korean Catholic directory. The directory records June 28, 1991 as the establishment date of Jisepo, and the diocesan biography of Father Lee Jae-cheol Adrian states that from that same date he served as pastor of the “Jisepo quasi-parish.” This indicates that the community first began to operate with a more independent pastoral structure in the form of a quasi-parish.

In the diocesan record, Father Lee’s assignment changes on October 28, 1992 to pastor of “Jisepo Parish.” The records therefore show that the community passed from quasi-parish status into the structure of a full parish around that time. The general history of the Diocese of Masan likewise lists Jisepo among parishes established in 1992. It is therefore reasonable to understand the directory’s 1991 date as the beginning of the quasi-parish and the diocesan 1992 date as the transition to full parish status.

Jisepo subsequently took its place as a parish serving the Irun-myeon area of eastern Geoje. Official sources do not provide enough detail to reconstruct the entire earlier mission-station history with confidence, but the transition from quasi-parish to parish in the early 1990s clearly marks the institutional beginning of the present parish community.

The apparently different establishment dates in the sources do not necessarily describe the same event differently; rather, they use different institutional milestones, the beginning of the quasi-parish and the transition to a full parish. Read separately, the sources show the community’s greater independence in 1991 and the establishment of the parish structure in 1992 as consecutive stages. This allows the origins of the present parish to be explained without forcing an unverified earlier chronology into the account.