Korean Catholicism After Liberation

The Korean Catholic church seemed to be riddled with uncertainties over its extent of social participation shortly after the liberation of the Korean Peninsula in 1945.

At least that was my sense after reading O Kyong-hwan's article. (Korean Catholicism Since 1945, in The Founding of Catholic Tradition in Korea, Ed. Chai-Shin Yu, Asian Humanities Press 2004).

After Liberation the church realized that the percentage of the lower class is far smaller than that of the population as a whole.

"This was not always so. Most Korean Catholics were poor up until the 1960s. Afterwards the situation seemed to have changed, for reasons which are not yet clear. If the reason is that the church has been more inclined to mission to the middle class while remaining indifferent to the lower classes, it would be a big problem, and the church's actual mission activity would be far from and inconsistent with the teaching of the Bible and its own injunction of "Take care of the poor first," O wrote.

Despite the church's participation in the democratization movement, "it showed an excessive adhesion to the Democratic Party led by Chang Myon (pictured). " Chang became the second prime minister of South Korea in 1960 after Syngman Rhee's government was ousted by a student-led pro-democracy uprising.

"These acts made the people think that the church was joining hands with a specific political figure and party," O noted.

Then there was the North-South division, which in O's view "symbolized the lack of ethnic self-determination", made "the social structures of North and South Korea inhuman", and hence unification "should have been the church's greatest concern."

"About the late 1940s, when the division became fixed, the church could have said to have helped it take root rather than helping to overcome it ... the church scarcely understood the sociological meaning of the division and the harmful effects it would have on social structures."

Immediately after Liberation, two political groups in the South were pitted against each other, with one advocating division while the other unification through negotiations with the North. The first group was represented by Lee Sung-man (or Syngman Rhee), while the latter by Kim Ku and the Korean Provisional Government. At first the church was indecisive but later decided to align itself with the pro-division group.

O said it is "obvious that the church, a small religious group, could not have a strong influence in deciding the nation's fate."

But it is also clear that the "church's traditional anti-Communist line and the Communists' extreme oppression of the churches in Eastern Europe and North Korea (had) created a great fear and distrust of Communists among Christians and clergymen in South Korea."

"Even if the church had supported the other group, the one against the division, the result would have been the same, because there existed foreign powers of superior strength. The leaders of the church were lacking in sociological knowledge and historical knowledge about the matters of nationalism, division, and unification, and seem to have made a regrettable choice."