We now know a little more about the fate of the massacres perpetrated more than seventy years ago by the communists on several hundred North Korean Christians.
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission – a South Korean state body – published a report on February 22, 2022, indicating that 1,145 Christians, including 119 Catholics, had been systematically annihilated by North Korean forces from September 26, 1950.
Massacres of clerics were carried out after North Korea issued an order to “eliminate reactionary forces” before its withdrawal from the South, according to the official report which is based on documentary research, direct testimonies of witnesses still living, and investigations in the parishes of origin of the victims.
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission has thus made it possible to resolve the enigma surrounding the fate of Bishop Francis Hong Yong-ho.
The prelate, born in 1906, ordained a priest in 1933 while Korea was under Japanese occupation, was consecrated bishop in 1944 in order to take up the position of head of the apostolic vicariate of Pyongyang. Imprisoned in communist jails in 1949, they definitely lost track of him on that date.
In 2013, the official directory of the Holy See still attached to his name the laconic description as “disappeared,” however, the following year the prelate was presumed dead, because he would have been 108 years old if he had survived. The report published a few weeks ago by the Seoul authorities officially confirms the death of Bishop Hong for the first time, who has been added to the thick black book of the victims of communism in the peninsula.
Governed for several centuries – from 1392 to 1897 – by the Joseon dynasty, of Buddhist faith, the land of the morning calm later became a Japanese protectorate, until the end of the Second World War, when the peninsula was the scene of a confrontation by proxy between the United States on the one hand, and the Soviet Union and China, on the other hand.
Between 1950 and 1953, the extremely brutal conflict caused the death of some four million people and the displacement of approximately ten million families.
For Fr. Francis Cho Han-geon, director of the Research Foundation of Korean Church History, the report published by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission is of great importance for the Church, finally doing justice to the many Catholics massacred in hatred of the faith by the communist hydra.
An official report from the South Korean authorities finally does justice to the many Christians murdered in hatred of the faith by the North Korean communists in the aftermath of the Second World War.