{"id":5156,"date":"2006-10-20T10:14:06","date_gmt":"2006-10-20T10:14:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2006\/10\/catholicism-in-north-korea.html"},"modified":"2006-10-20T10:14:06","modified_gmt":"2006-10-20T10:14:06","slug":"catholicism-in-north-korea","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/10\/catholicism-in-north-korea.html","title":{"rendered":"Catholicism in North Korea"},"content":{"rendered":"

John Allen:<\/a><\/p>\n

\n
\n

In the early twentieth century, North Korea was home to a small but flourishing Catholic community, with two territorial dioceses and a territorial abbacy entrusted to the Benedictine Order. During the 1950-53 Korean War, however, the Catholic presence was all but snuffed out \u2013 every priest in the country was exiled, imprisoned or executed, and all Catholic institutions were seized by the state.<\/p>\n

Benedictine Abbot Primate Fr. Nokter Wolf, for example, told NCR<\/em> on Oct. 19 that all 18 Benedictines in North Korea at the time of the war perished, either by immediate execution or from eventual death in a labor camp. Their abbey was taken over by the Communists, and is today a Faculty of Agriculture.<\/p>\n

The last Bishop of Pyongyang, Francis Hong Yong-ho, is still listed in the Annuario Pontificio<\/em>, the official Vatican yearbook, as \u201cdisappeared\u201d since March 10, 1962. Since that time, the archbishop of Seoul, South Korea, has also been designated the apostolic administrator of Pyongyang.<\/p>\n

Today, Hwang described a situation that in some ways seems eerily reminiscent of the catacombs.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Read the rest.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

John Allen: In the early twentieth century, North Korea was home to a small but flourishing Catholic community, with two territorial dioceses and a territorial abbacy entrusted to the Benedictine Order. During the 1950-53 Korean War, however, the Catholic presence was all but snuffed out \u2013 every priest in the country was exiled, imprisoned or…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5156","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nCatholicism in North Korea - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2006\/10\/catholicism-in-north-korea.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Catholicism in North Korea - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"John Allen: In the early twentieth century, North Korea was home to a small but flourishing Catholic community, with two territorial dioceses and a territorial abbacy entrusted to the Benedictine Order. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5156","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5156"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5156\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5156"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5156"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5156"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}