ABSTRACT
In 1801, an anti-Catholic persecution broke out in Korea. The first of its kind in the country, it was motivated both by a desire to protect Korean Confucian civilization against the moral danger allegedly posed by Catholicism and to punish factional enemies. The killing of the country’s only priest led one local Catholic to write a letter asking Pope Pius VII to send an armada to Korea to intimidate the kingdom into tolerating Catholicism. Persecutions would continue into the late 1870s, after which Korea’s treaty with France transformed the latter’s missionaries into powerful Westerners protected by extraterritoriality. The resultant Catholic expansion on the island of Cheju, and its link with the collection of increased taxes meant to fund modernization, led to a popular uprising and armed conflict that resulted ultimately in the massacre of hundreds of Catholics in 1901. The chapter uses these two case studies to illustrate the complexity of ‘Catholic violence’ in nineteenth-century Korea, revealing how multiple actors could share the same religious label while behaving in very different ways. In doing so, it delivers a critique of essentialist understandings of the relationship between religion, politics, and violence.
