Jeondong Catholic Church: built on the exact spot where Korea’s first Catholic martyrs were beheaded

In Jeonju, in South Korea, the Catholic church of Jeondong stands on the site where, on 8 December 1791, Paul Yun Ji-chung and his cousin James Kwon Sang-yeon were beheaded outside the south gate of the city, the Pungnammun, during the Sinhae Persecution. They were punished for burning ancestral tablets and refusing Confucian rites in what became known as the “Jinsan incident”, and they were Korea’s first Catholic martyrs. Later martyrs of the 1801 Sinyu Persecution, among them Yu Hang-geom and Yun Ji-heon, are associated with the same execution ground. The land was bought in 1891 by the French priest François-Xavier Baudounet. Construction of the church began in 1908, to mark the centenary of the persecution, and was completed in 1914. The design is credited to the architect Victor Louis Poisnel, who also designed Myeongdong Cathedral in Seoul, which accounts for the strong resemblance between the two buildings. It is in Romanesque-Byzantine style, the first building in that style raised in the Honam, or Jeolla, region: a rectangular brick basilica with three Byzantine domes atop its bell towers and cross-vaulted ceilings. Some of the stones used in its foundations came, according to Korean Catholic sources, from a stretch of the city walls of Jeonju, dismantled in the early years of the twentieth century by the Japanese Residency-General to build a new road, with Father Baudounet obtaining permission to reuse the stones. The church was declared national Historic Monument no. 288 on 25 September 1981. It remains an active Catholic parish of the Diocese of Jeonju, and is today one of the most photographed places in the Jeonju Hanok Village area. Yun Ji-chung and Kwon Sang-yeon were not among the 103 Korean martyrs canonized by Pope John Paul II in 1984. They were beatified, together with 122 other Korean martyrs including Yun Ji-heon, by Pope Francis in Seoul on 16 August 2014.