A Religion That Arrived in Books

Catholicism entered Korea in an unusual way. It was not brought by missionaries. In the later eighteenth century Korean scholars encountered Christian works in Chinese, brought back from the annual embassy to Beijing, studied them among themselves, and organised a community before any foreign priest had set foot in the country. A member of one such group was baptised in Beijing and returned to baptise others. That origin gave Korean Catholicism a lay character from the beginning, and it also put it directly at odds with the Joseon settlement, because the rejection of ancestral rites by the church at that period struck at the practice on which the whole social order rested.

Refusal to perform the rites was treated as a rejection of the state itself, and a series of persecutions across the nineteenth century produced a large number of executions, from which the Korean martyrs are drawn. The atlas records the persecutions as historical fact and the doctrinal question behind them as one the Catholic Church later revisited, since the ban on the ancestral rites was substantially relaxed in the twentieth century. The pattern of a religion arriving as text rather than as mission is rare enough to be worth marking.