Sinwoldong Church

History & origins

The roots of Sinwol-dong Catholic Church lie in a mission station established in the mid-1970s. As the Catholic population around Hwagok and Sinwol increased and travel to an existing parish remained inconvenient, a private house in Sinwol 2-dong was rented around October 1975 for use as the Sinwol mission station. When Sinjeong-dong Parish was established in 1976, the mission came under the new parish's jurisdiction. With major residential development and population growth anticipated in the Mokdong–Sinjeong area, Sinjeong-dong Parish and the Archdiocese of Seoul then began preparing an independent parish for Sinwol.

Land at the present site was secured in 1983, and on August 1, 1984, Sinwol-dong Parish was established by separation from Sinjeong-dong Parish. The new parish took St. Joseph as its patron and began independent liturgical and pastoral life. Construction of a prefabricated church began in March 1985 and was completed in May 1986, giving the community a stable worship space. Thus a community that had begun in a private house as a mission station developed over roughly a decade into an independent parish with its own church.

Continued population growth eventually led Sinwol-dong Parish to give rise to another community. A mission station for the Sinjeong 3-dong area was established in 1990, and in September 2002 it became the independent Sinjeong 3-dong Parish, with 229 households and 615 Catholics transferred from Sinwol-dong. The history of Sinwol-dong therefore forms a continuous sequence: a small mission under Hwagok, transfer to Sinjeong-dong, independent parish status, and later the creation of a daughter parish. It illustrates how the Catholic pastoral network in southwestern Seoul became progressively organized around smaller living areas as housing development advanced.