Yangjae-dong Catholic Church

History & origins

The roots of Yangjae-dong Parish go back to 1912, when a Catholic station was formed in an area known at the time as Geri, an old name associated with Yangjae-ri. The community later grew under the jurisdiction of Jamsil-ri Parish. As urban development and population growth accelerated in the Gangnam area during the 1960s, the need for an independent parish became increasingly clear. Church sources agree that in July 1965 the community was separated from Jamsil-ri Parish and began as Maljukgeori Parish; the following year it adopted the name Yangjae-dong Parish.

From the 1970s, the full-scale development of Gangnam brought rapid growth to the parish. Yangjae-dong successively gave rise to parishes including Cheongdam-dong, Sadang-dong, Banpo, Seocho-dong, Yeoksam-dong, Gaepo-dong, Yangjae 2-dong and Umyeon-dong. As new parishes became independent, it transferred parishioners and parish records and helped them secure the foundations needed for their own church communities.

Alongside outward growth, the parish continued faith formation and service to neighbors in need. In the 1990s, local charitable activity received recognition from the local government, and in 2015 the parish marked its 50th anniversary by publishing a history of its first half-century. Its development from an early Catholic station into a parish that gave rise to many others clearly shows the historical character of Yangjae-dong Parish.

This was more than an administrative division. It was the process by which Catholic communities took root in new residential districts as the city expanded. Even as its own territory became smaller, Yangjae-dong shared human and material resources so that new communities could become self-supporting, contributing to the dense parish network that now characterizes Gangnam and Seocho.