Sihwa St. Peter's Church

History & origins

시화성베드로 Parish was established in Jeongwang-dong on February 14, 1997, in response to the growing Catholic population of the Sihwa area. With Saint Peter the Apostle as its patron, it began as an independent parish at the same stage of regional development as 시화성바오로 Parish and formed its own pastoral community within the Jeongwang-dong living area.

In 2012 the Diocese of Suwon standardized parish names and the way patron saints were expressed, fixing the former name “Sihwa Peter Parish” as the present “Sihwa Saint Peter Parish.” This did not break the historical continuity of the parish; rather, it clarified in a uniform diocesan form its identity under the patronage of Saint Peter the Apostle.

The parish developed evangelization efforts suited to its urban commercial setting. In 2018 it held training and a commissioning event for parish-wide street evangelization and planned regular outreach at several points around the church. This illustrates how the community sought not only to cultivate liturgy and parish organizations within the church but also to approach people directly in the surrounding daily-life environment.

In 2022 the diocesan chronology recorded a Mass for the parish’s twenty-fifth anniversary. The sequence from its establishment in 1997, through the 2012 naming standardization, to locally adapted missionary activity and the twenty-fifth anniversary shows how the parish took root alongside the development of the new urban district and formed its own community culture. The dense mix of shops and housing in Jeongwang-dong provided a setting in which the parish developed a form of evangelization that cared for its internal community while also meeting new people in the streets.