Franklin Rausch

10.18399/acta.2008.11.3.003

Catholicism Protestantism education missionaries An Chunggŭn

When Catholicism was introduced into Korea in the late Chosŏn dynasty, new scientific knowledge came with it. While Confucian scholars were more interested in the former than the latter, some eventually converted to the new faith, and a Catholic community came into being in Korea. The threat posed by Catholicism to the Chosŏn state led to persecutions that decimated the Church until the 1886 treaty between Korea and France granted it tolerance. This led to a time of rapid growth. However, as Korea came to be increasingly under foreign domination, Protestant Christianity, which had arrived in Korea decades after Catholicism, grew much more quickly. In this article I will argue that the educational policy of the Catholic Church, that is, what the Catholic Church taught and the means it employed to that end, played an important role in its reception, development, growth, and influence in Korea. Furthermore I will contend, focusing on An Chunggŭn’s university proposal, that the Catholic Church’s emphasis on otherworldly religious issues in its educational policy, while enabling it to survive and even grow during times of persecution, was not as appealing to Koreans in general during the closing years of the Chosŏn dynasty. This orientation, when combined with the Catholic Church’s lack of financial resources, led to its stagnation and its eclipse by Protestant Christianity, which followed an educational policy that sought to balance this-worldly and other-worldly concerns and had greater access to financial support.