Seokpo Mission Station

History & origins

The Catholic Church directory of the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of Korea records October 1980 as the establishment date of Seokpo Mission Station. A 1985 field report in The Catholic Times stated that the believers had begun mission-station services about five years earlier, supporting the conclusion that regular communal Catholic life took shape around 1980. At first, two or three Catholic households living in employee apartments connected with local industry formed the core of the community.

The early believers continued meeting without a purpose-built church. About three years later, they purchased an old private house and converted it for use as the mission station. The report also notes that a local company assisted with building materials. This marked the transition from a small gathering of believers to a community with a dedicated place of its own.

After the community became established, a new mission-station building was undertaken. The Catholic Times reported that a one-story prefabricated mission-station building of about 54 pyeong was erected on a site of roughly 2,040 pyeong and completed in November 1991 and, after the surrounding grounds were finished, was dedicated on September 6, 1992, in a ceremony presided over by Bishop Kim Ji-seok of Wonju. Compared with the earlier converted house, the new building provided a more stable liturgical space and a visible center where Catholics in the mountain area could sustain community life.

The history of Seokpo differs from a typical case of a large parish being divided: it grew from a few Catholic families near an industrial workplace into an organized mission community with its own building. It has continued since then as a mission station of the Diocese of Wonju and as a local center of Catholic life.