The History of Catholicism in Korea, Martyrdom, Persecution, and Resilience: A Conversation with Dr. Don Baker

This is episode 12 of season 3 of What Matters Most, featuring Dr. Don Baker, Professor of Korean Civilization at UBC in Asian Studies since 1987. The story you will hear him tell about Catholicism in Korea and about the Gwangju democratization movement or resistance in 1980, some of which he was present for, is powerful and moving. It is also a story of the power of moral resistance and the cost of such resistance to many individuals, a cost paid by many with their lives. But the fight for democracy in Korea against military dictatorship is also a story of the worth of such a resistance that included many religious people and many ordinary Koreans.    

Don also traces the history of Catholicism in Korea, which arrived with some elite neo-Confucian scholars only in 1784, with the Protestant church arriving a full century later in 1884. It is a story of persecution and martyrdom and Don has written about this in a number of books, including Catholics and Anti-Catholicism in Choson Korea and Persecution and Martyrdoms: Korea. It is a story of suffering, but also of resilience and faithfulness.

This is a powerful episode and it was moving to me to hear it, I suspect it might be for you too, and more significantly it was moving for Don who witnessed the events of the democratization resistance at Gwangju in 1980 to recount the story of suffering.

Dictatorship is never the pathway forward and it took great moral courage, resilience, and many lives to cast off the Korean dictatorship. This is the kind of moral courage needed today to defend democracy all over the world. The nuns and priests, other religious figures, and the ordinary people of Korea showed this great resistance and as a result the Catholic church in Korea is the most respected religion there to this day, a Church without scandal.

But it is a Church that emerged from great suffering too starting soon after its arrival in Korea by Koreans themselves, neo-Confucian scholars who found writings about Catholicism by Matte Ricci in China and brought it back themselves in 1784. There were no priests in Korea when the persecutions against Korean Catholics began. They had brought the religion themselves and made it their own and persevered.

This is truly an episode about what matters most, about the choices people made to accept suffering to remain faithful to their beliefs, and about people in the 1980s, nuns and priests included, who were willing to stand up for democracy against dictatorship. This is something all of us need to keep asking, what matters most to us, what is more important to us than more money or more power? Because these things do not satisfy at the deepest level. Every day one sees political leaders, billionaires, striving for more, and more, more money, more countries, more power, while the many go without enough to eat or a place to live. The Korean Catholic church demonstrates that better than that is a life lived in tune with the truth and in tune with the deepest hopes of human beings, freedom, integrity, and truth. Strongman co