Jeong Yak-jong

Life

Jeong Yak-jong was born in 1760 into a scholarly family at Majae in Gwangju, Gyeonggi Province (present-day Neungnae-ri, Joan-myeon, Namyangju). He was the third of the four sons of Jeong Jae-won, magistrate of Jinju (Yak-hyeon, Yak-jeon, Yak-jong, and Yak-yong), and was an elder brother of the Silhak scholar Jeong Yak-yong. In 1786 he encountered Catholic teaching through his second elder brother, Jeong Yak-jeon, and that same year he is reported to have been baptized by Yi Seung-hun, taking the baptismal name Augustine. Although he was the last of the brothers to embrace Catholicism, his faith is said to have been the deepest.

After the Chinese priest Zhou Wenmo entered Korea at the end of 1794, Jeong frequently traveled to Hanyang (Seoul) to receive the sacraments and assist in the work of the Church. The sacraments are rites, such as baptism, confession, and the Eucharist, that the Catholic Church regards as signs of grace. When persecution broke out near his hometown in 1800, he moved his family to Hanyang. When the Sinyu Persecution began the following year, he was arrested on the eleventh day of the second lunar month, and fifteen days later, on April 8, 1801 (the twenty-sixth day of the second lunar month), he was beheaded outside the Seosomun Gate. He was forty-one years old. According to one account, just before his execution he declared that he would rather die looking up at heaven than looking down at the earth.

Ministry and Achievements

• Authorship of the Jugyo yoji: This exposition of doctrine was written entirely in Hangul so that commoners, women, and children who could not read Classical Chinese could understand the faith. It consists of two volumes, the first with thirty-two chapters and the second with eleven. Believed to have been written in the late 1790s, it received Father Zhou Wenmo's approval and circulated widely among believers. It treats the existence and attributes of God, the creation of heaven and earth, original sin, the Incarnation (Christ's birth as a human being) and Redemption, the resurrection, the immortality of the soul, the doctrine that good is rewarded and evil punished, and heaven and hell; it also contains criticism of Buddhism and Taoism. The Catholic Church regards it as the first Hangul catechism written by a Korean believer. Father Zhou is said to have remarked that in this country the book was more essential than fodder and firewood.
• President of the Myeongdohoe: Father Zhou Wenmo founded an association called the Myeongdohoe so that lay people could study doctrine and spread the faith, and Jeong Yak-jong served as its first president. The association clearly illustrates a characteristic feature of the early Korean Catholic Church, in which lay believers led the Church at a time when there were almost no clergy.

Influence on the Korean Church

Jeong's family produced a succession of martyrs. His eldest son, Jeong Cheol-sang (Charles), was martyred in 1801, the same year as his father, while his second wife, Yu Jo-i (Cecilia), his son Jeong Ha-sang (Paul), and his daughter Jeong Jeong-hye (Elizabeth) were martyred during the Gihae Persecution of 1839. Yu Jo-i, Jeong Ha-sang, and Jeong Jeong-hye were among the 103 Korean Martyrs canonized by Pope John Paul II during his visit to Korea in 1984. The Jugyo yoji is credited with helping believers scattered by persecution to confess the same doctrine and sustain their communities.

Assessment

On August 16, 2014, at a Mass celebrated by Pope Francis at Gwanghwamun in Seoul, the Catholic Church beatified him as one of the companions in the group "Paul Yun Ji-chung and 123 Companions." Beatification is the declaration of a person as Blessed, a status of veneration one step below sainthood. The feast of these 124 Blesseds is observed on May 29. Jeong's remains lay in a family burial ground in Sasa-dong, Ansan, Gyeonggi Province, for nearly a hundred years before being moved to the Cheonjinam Shrine in 1981.

Some scholars have noted that the Jugyo yoji was based on Matteo Ricci's Tianzhu shiyi (The True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven). Others, however, credit it with originality for explaining nearly all its doctrines through the content of Scripture. Its sharp criticism of other religions is regarded as a feature that distinguishes it from modern catechisms. Protestantism has no practice of venerating saints or the Blessed. Nevertheless, Jeong is studied in Protestant scholarship as a figure in the history of Christianity's arrival in Korea. A study of the Jugyo yoji appeared in the Korea Presbyterian Journal of Theology (Jangsin Nondan), the academic journal of Presbyterian University and Theological Seminary, and in 2024 the Jugyo yoji was published in a modern Korean rendering as a volume in an anthology of Christian spirituality.