Changchung Cathedral, Pyongyang: North Korea’s only Catholic church has had no resident priest for 75 years

In the Changchung neighbourhood, Songyo district, in Pyongyang, the cathedral of the Sacred Heart is the only Catholic church of North Korea. It replaces an earlier red brick cathedral of the nineteenth century destroyed during the Korean War. Construction, begun in March 1988 and completed on 9 October of the same year, came a few months before the thirteenth World Festival of Youth and Students, held in Pyongyang in July 1989. In the same window, on 30 June 1988, the Korean Catholic Association (KCA) was founded, a state body not recognised by the Holy See, in what several independent sources describe as a deliberate effort by the regime to project an image of religious tolerance before the wave of visitors, journalists and figures from the Eastern bloc expected for the event. The name of an architect is not documented, and the descriptions of the interior differ markedly among the few sources available, with capacity estimates ranging between two hundred and fifty and two thousand people. The cathedral of the apostolic vicariate of Pyongyang, erected in 1927 under the Maryknoll missionaries, has been vacant since 1949, when Bishop Francis Hong Yong-ho was arrested by the North Korean regime and never seen again. The Holy See formally recognised his death only in June 2013, without being able to establish its date, place or circumstances. In the same period about eighty religious of the Benedictine territorial abbey of Tokwon were arrested, among them Abbot Boniface Sauer, who died in a Pyongyang prison on 1 February 1950. According to the sources of the congregation, fourteen monks and two nuns were executed and another seventeen monks and two nuns died of hunger, illness or forced labour, with only forty-two survivors repatriated to Germany in January 1954. To this day, as stated by Cardinal Lazarus You Heung-sik on 3 July 2026, no bishop, priest or religious sister recognised by the Vatican lives in North Korea, and the Holy See holds no diplomatic relations with Pyongyang. Bodies such as the United Nations Commission of Inquiry of 2014 and the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom describe this cathedral, together with a few other churches in Pyongyang, as places of worship run by the State mainly for propaganda purposes abroad, while independent religious practice remains criminalised and clandestine in the rest of the country. An eyewitness account by a journalist of La Croix International, dated 3 November 2017, describes a Sunday service of about forty minutes led not by a priest but by a layman, the president of the state Catholic association, before a hundred and fifty to two hundred faithful, all over sixty. From 1995 until his death in 2015, Father Park Chang-deuk, a Korean-American Augustinian priest, celebrated Mass in this cathedral every year. In December 2015 a delegation of the Korean bishops’ conference reached an agreement with the state Catholic association to allow South Korean priests to celebrate Mass here on the main feast days, beginning with Easter 2016.