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Saints Andrew Kim Taegon, Priest, and Paul Chong Hasang, and their Companions, Martyrs 
 on Monday of week 25 in Ordinary Time

Using calendar: Latin America - Brazil. You can change this.

The Lord is the king of martyrs: come, let us adore him.

Year: C(I). Psalm week: 1. Liturgical Colour: Red.

St Andrew Kim Taegǒn, Paul Chong Hasang, and companions

For centuries, Korea was closed to all outside influences, and all contact with foreigners was forbidden. No missionaries went there. Nevertheless, a number of laymen sought to find out all that they could about the outside world, through the annual embassy to Peking. Some books about Christianity fell into their hands, and they were converted. Because of the secrecy involved, it is impossible to date the origin of Christianity in Korea with any precision: it may have started in the early 17th century, but the first known baptism is that of Ni-Seoung-Houn, who was baptized under the name of Peter when he visited Peking in 1784.
  The first known martyrs are Paul Youn and James Kouen, who in 1791 refused to offer sacrifice on the death of their relatives. Over the next century, over ten thousand Korean Christians were executed, with great cruelty; and many others perished.
  For most of this period the church in Korea had no priests and was an entirely lay phenomenon. In 1794 the first priest to visit Korea, a Chinese, found a community of 4,000 Catholics who had never seen a priest. He was executed in 1801. Two further Chinese priests, sent at the request of the Korean Church, had a similarly brief ministry. Some thirty years later, at the request of the Korean Catholics, Pope Leo XII established the Prefecture Apostolic of Korea, and a new missionary phase began. The first of these missionaries, a French priest from the Paris Foreign Mission Society, entered the country in 1836 and was beheaded three years later. Many others followed. Andrew Kim Taegǒn, the first Korean priest, was secretly trained in Macao, entered Korea in 1845 and was executed in 1846, together with his father. A lay apostle, St Paul Chong Hasang, and many others perished at the same time. A further major persecution occurred in 1866.
  In all, 103 of the Korean martyrs are celebrated today: they are mostly lay men and women: some married, some not; some old, some young, some even children.
  “The Korean Church is unique because it was founded entirely by laypeople. This fledgling Church, so young and yet so strong in faith, withstood wave after wave of fierce persecution. Thus, in less than a century, it could boast of 10,000 martyrs. The death of these many martyrs became the leaven of the Church and led to today’s splendid flowering of the Church in Korea. Even today their undying spirit sustains the Christians of the Church of Silence in the north of this tragically divided land.” – Pope John Paul II at the canonization of the Korean Martyrs, May 6, 1984.

Liturgical colour: red

Red is the colour of fire and of blood. Liturgically, it is used to celebrate the fire of the Holy Spirit (for instance, at Pentecost) and the blood of the martyrs.

Mid-morning reading (Terce)Romans 13:8,10 ©
Avoid getting into debt, except the debt of mutual love. If you love your fellow men you have carried out your obligations. Love is the one thing that cannot hurt your neighbour; that is why it is the answer to every one of the commandments.

Noon reading (Sext)James 1:19-20,26 ©
Be quick to listen but slow to speak and slow to rouse your temper; God’s righteousness is never served by man’s anger. Nobody must imagine that he is religious while he still goes on deceiving himself and not keeping control over his tongue; anyone who does this has the wrong idea of religion.

Afternoon reading (None)1 Peter 1:17,18,19 ©
You must be scrupulously careful as long as you are living away from your home. Remember, the ransom that was paid to free you was not paid in anything corruptible, neither in silver nor gold, but in the precious blood of a lamb without spot or stain, namely Christ.

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Scripture readings taken from The Jerusalem Bible, published and copyright © 1966, 1967 and 1968 by Darton, Longman & Todd, Ltd and Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc, and used by permission of the publishers. For on-line information about other Random House, Inc. books and authors, see the Internet web site at http://www.randomhouse.com.
 
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