Beatification of North Korean Victims of Communism Opened

Benedictine Abbey in Waegwan announced last week that a beatification process of 36 North Koreans martyred during the 1949-1952 Stalinist regime of Kim Il-sung has been opened.CZECH

Seoul (ROK): The opening of a beatification process of 36 Morth Korean martyrs has been announced last week by the St Benedict Abbey in Waegwan, South Korea, which exercises ecclesial jurisdiction over the North Korean Abbacy of Tokwon. The process is for the beatification of Benedictine Abbot Bishop Boniface Sauer, Benedictine Father Benedict Kim and companions. These men were martyred in North Korean communist death camps during the wave of anti-Catholic persecution after the communists led by Kim Il-sung came to power. In some way they are all linked to the Tokwon Abbey.

The initiative also has a political value, some says, because until now, the Seoul government has exerted its influence to avoid the commemoration of these martyrs in order not to provoke a diplomatic incident with the present regime in the North, led by Kim Jong-il, Kim Il-sung's son.

Since the end of the civil war in 1953, the three local ecclesiastical jurisdictions and the whole Catholic community in North Korea have been wiped out by the Stalinist regime. Not a single local priest has been left alive and all foreign clergymen have been expelled. Today, there are neither resident priests nor ecclesial structures. According to Vatican sources, Catholics in North Korea number 800, far fewer than the 3,000 recently acknowledged by the government.