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About this place
Hwarangdae Catholic Church is a parish of the Military Ordinariate of Korea located within the Korea Military Academy in Nowon-gu, Seoul. The ordinariate's official parish page confirms its current address at 634 Hwarang-ro, identifies Saint Ignatius of Loyola as its patron, and lists the Sisters of Our Lady of Perpetual Help as the religious community sharing in its apostolate.
The parish community includes cadets, enlisted service members, officers, and family members. It provides officer candidates with a setting for Mass, the sacraments, and faith formation while sustaining a Catholic community within the life of the military academy. The way cadet ministry and ministry to service members and their families meet within a single parish is a defining feature of Hwarangdae Catholic Church.
History & origins
The Korean Catholic Encyclopedia traces the origins of Hwarangdae parish to Catholic military ministry at the Korea Military Academy in 1954. Father Choi Chang-gyu, ordained in May of that year, served as an Army Headquarters chaplain and became the first pastor of the academy church. After U.S. military advisers had withdrawn, he obtained permission from the academy headquarters to use a vacant bachelor officers' quarters of about twenty pyeong, dividing it so that one side served as the church and the other as the rectory.
A legacy parish page of Hwarangdae Catholic Church records that a pastoral council was established on November 24, 1983. Sections for cadets, soldiers, education, mission, and other areas reflecting the character of a military academy were organized, showing the development from a small provisional worship space into a more structured parish community.
The official biography of Bishop Titus Seo Sang-bum, Ordinary of the Military Ordinariate, states that he served from 1993 to 1996 as pastor of Hwarangdae (Korea Military Academy) parish while also directing the ordinariate's pastoral office. In this way, the community that began in a temporary church in the 1950s developed lay organizations and pastoral structures and grew into an institutionalized military parish of the academy.
Korean Catholic Places Encyclopedia
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Diocese
Military Ordinariate (Military Ordinariate of Korea)
Official website: http://www.gunjong.or.kr
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