Posted on 08/21/2014 12:10:32 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
SOUTH KOREA, a dynamo of growth, is also afire with faith. This week Pope Francis will spend five days there, for Asian Youth Day and to beatify 124 early martyrs. About 5.4m of South Koreas 50m people are Roman Catholics. Perhaps 9m more are Protestants, of many stripes.
Yoido Full Gospel Churchs 1m members form the largest Pentecostal congregation on Earth. Beliefs farther shores include the Unification Church, soon to mark the anniversary of its founder Sun-myung Moons "ascension".
The late Yoo Byung-eun, the shifty and versatile tycoon behind the ferry Sewol which sank in April, killing 304 mostly teenage passengers, had also founded his own sect (and the website God.com, now in other hands); its followers hid him during Koreas largest-ever police man-hunt.
All this is particularly striking, because Asia is mostly stony ground for Christianity. Spanish rule left the Philippines strongly Catholic, but Korea is less simple.
In the 18th century curious intellectuals encountered Catholicism in Beijing and smuggled it home. Confucian monarchs, brooking no rival allegiance, executed most early converts: hence all those martyrs, ranking Korea fourth globally for quantity of saints. Protestantism came later and fared better. By the 1880s Korea was opening up, and the mainly American missionaries made two astute moves: opening the first modern schools, which admitted girls; and translating the Bible into the vernacular Hangul Korean alphabet, then viewed as infra dig, rather than the Chinese characters favoured by literati.
The seeds thus sown incubated under Japans rule (1910-45), and have sprouted wildly since. The trauma of Japanese conquest eroded faith in Confucian or Buddhist traditions: Koreans could relate to Israels sufferings in the Old Testament (no Chosen jokes, please). Yet by 1945 only 2% of Koreans were Christian.
(Excerpt) Read more at economist.com ...
bump
it is a great video that I have seen several times
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