Anecdotes about the Virgin Mary

Saint Andrew Kim Taegon, the first priest of a people in love with Mary

Solmoe and Mirinae (Korea)

The Church in Korea has a rare origin: at the end of the 18th century they were lay who, reading Christian books from China, embraced the faith before of the arrival of resident missionaries. Those catechisms and manuals brought the doctrine and prayers of the Catholic tradition, and with them the name and love of Mary. From that first community, later irrigated by decades of persecution, would emerge one of the most living Churches in Asia.

On that floor was born -- Andrés Kim Taegon, en Solmoe, considered the cradle of his family and one of the country's first Catholic cores. It is historically certain that it was the first Korean priest and who died mártir en 1846, still young. His body rests in Mirinae, today's pilgrimage place. It belongs to the group of 103 Korean martyrs canonized by John Paul II in Seoul, 1984: a fact of the universal magisterium, fully true, and a beautiful ecclesial gesture, for the canonization was celebrated in the land itself ruled by its blood.

It is appropriate to be honest with devotion: the general sources firmly witness their holiness, their priesthood and their martyrdom, but no consta in them a concrete scene of hidden rosary or explicit Marian prayer attributed to St. Andrew Kim. What is not documented is not invented. What can be said in truth is that he lived and died within a community whose catechesis included Marian piety, and that same community venerated it today with the Virgin.

Therefore, a pilgrimage to Solmoe or Mirinae is to enter the heart of a faith that was born almost in silence, sustained by lay people and sealed by martyrs. Mary, present from the first books that ignited those consciences, appears as the Mother who accompanied a people in their darkest hour. The Rosary, so widespread in Korean families today, perpetuates that seed: meditating on the mysteries of Christ hand in hand with his Mother is to follow the path trod to the very end by the first priest of Korea.