The Catholic Church in North Korea is not officially part of the worldwide Catholic Church or under the spiritual leadership of the Pope in Rome. It allegedly does not belong to the Roman Rite of the Catholic Church. The church is administered by the Korean Catholic Association, created by the Communist government in June 1988 as a means of control over Catholic life. The remaining Catholic churches are inactive. According to reports from within North Korea, courtesy of the KCA, there are approximately 3,000 Catholics in the country. However, experts from other countries place the figure closer to 800. Christianity in North Korea is partly an underground movement, allegedly not receiving missionaries from southern China. Kim Jong-il invited Pope John Paul II to Pyongyang after the 2000 inter-Korean summit, but the visit failed to materialize. A similar invitation to Pope Francis was made by Kim Jong-un following a series of inter-Korean summits in 2018. An invitation for the KCA to attend a Papal Mass in Seoul on 18 August 2014, during a 4-day visit to South Korea by Pope Francis, was declined by the association.
History
The first Catholic missionaries arrived in 1794, a decade after the return of Yi Sung-hun, a diplomat who was the first baptised Korean in Beijing. He established a grassroots lay Catholic movement in the peninsula. However, the writings of the Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci, who was resident at the imperial court in Beijing, had been already brought to Korea from China in the 17th century. Scholars of the Silhak were attracted to Catholic doctrines, and this was a key factor for the spread of the Catholic faith in the 1790s. The penetration of Western ideas and Christianity in Korea became known as Seohak. A study of 1801 found that more than half of the families that had converted to Catholicism were linked to the Silhak school. Largely because converts refused to perform Confucian ancestral rituals, the Joseon government prohibited the proselytisation of Christianity. Some Catholics were executed during the early 19th century, but the restrictive law was not strictly enforced. A large number of Christians lived in the northern half of the peninsula where Confucian influence was not as strong as in the south. Before 1948, Pyongyang was an important Christian center: one-sixth of its population of about 300,000 people were Christian converts. The population of the Pyongyang diocese as of 1943 was 3,650,623, all ethnic Koreans. After the division of Korea, however, the Communist government under Kim Il-sung persecuted Christians as imperialist collaborators and spies. Much of the Catholic community was either killed or imprisoned, and many more fled south. The martyrdom of the Benedictine monks of Tokwon Abbey was documented as the process of beatification was initiated for them. The Korean Roman Catholics' Association was set up on 30 June 1988. Samuel Chang Jae-on has been its president since its establishment. The association published a catechism and a prayer book in 1991.
