Samcheonpo Catholic Church

History & origins

The Catholic community in Samcheonpo traces its beginnings to March 1954. Fr. Kim Du-ho, Aloysius, then pastor of Jinju Catholic Church, now Okbong-dong Catholic Church, celebrated the first Mass with twelve Catholics in a one-room wooden shack by the waterfront in Seongu-dong. In June of the following year, the small community moved to the home of Choi Hak-rim, Andrew, and began regular mission-station services, taking shape as the Samcheonpo mission station.

Preparing for the establishment of a parish, Fr. Kim purchased the former township office building and its grounds in Seongu-dong in June 1956 and converted them for use by the mission station. The acquisition was intended to secure a base for a future independent parish. As the Catholic community became established, Samcheonpo Mission Station was separated from Jinju Parish and elevated to parish status in June 1957, becoming an independent pastoral center for the area.

After the Diocese of Masan was separated from the Diocese of Busan in 1966, Samcheonpo Parish gradually settled into the structure of the new diocese. Over time, the old church in Seongu-dong no longer met the community’s needs for space and facilities. Parishioners endured celebrating Mass in a temporary plastic-covered structure and raised construction funds through work such as preparing dried pollack. Their efforts bore fruit in September 1997, when a new church in Jwaryong-dong was dedicated, opening a new chapter in the parish’s history.

In 2007, the fiftieth anniversary of the parish’s establishment, the community published a fifty-year history of Samcheonpo Parish. The journey from a Mass celebrated by a handful of Catholics in a wooden shack, through a mission station and an independent parish, to the construction of a new church shows how Catholics in the port city of Samcheonpo built their community by securing places and resources through their own sustained efforts.