Jo Won Soldae Church

History & origins

Jowon Soldae Parish was established on January 25, 2000. The new parish did not begin with a completed church and full parish facilities. In its early period it celebrated Mass in rented commercial space and later used a prefabricated temporary church on the present site. Around these temporary spaces, the parish maintained liturgy, catechesis, and meetings while preparing for a permanent church.

Building a church remained a major task for roughly the first decade of the parish’s life. The Diocese of Suwon’s account of the dedication notes that the faithful worked toward a permanent church throughout the temporary-church period, and the project reached completion around the parish’s tenth anniversary in 2010.

On October 10, 2010, the new church was dedicated, ending the parish’s prolonged dependence on temporary facilities and giving it a stable physical base. The early history of Jowon Soldae Catholic Church thus illustrates how a newly created urban parish first formed its community in provisional spaces and then secured a permanent church in which to settle and grow. The 2025 twenty-fifth-anniversary record gives more detail about the parish’s beginning. Jowon Soldae Parish was created on January 25, 2000, when 489 households comprising 1,594 Catholics separated from Jowon-dong Cathedral Parish and Jeongja-dong Cathedral Parish. The parish was therefore established in response to the need to provide closer pastoral care for a growing Catholic population within the territories of the two large cathedral parishes. During its first decade, while preparing a permanent church, the new parish also built up neighborhood groups and pastoral structures for young people and older adults. For the twenty-fifth anniversary in 2025, the parish compiled its twenty-five-year history in electronic-book form and reviewed its past through photographs and video. This shows that the community itself remembers the 2000 separation, the years in temporary worship spaces, and the 2010 dedication as one continuous history. The ten years required to secure a permanent church were therefore not merely a waiting period but the formative years in which the new parish developed its organization and habits of faith.