Tae Ho Guak
In 1784 the son of a Korean envoy was baptized in Beijing and carried the books home. There were no missionaries in Korea. There would be none for eleven years. In the meantime a handful of scholars read their way into a faith, appointed their own clergy, and began baptizing one another. When the state finally understood what had grown up inside it, the killing went on, in waves, for a hundred years.This is the story of one family. Four brothers grew up in a house on the Han river above Seoul. The eldest never converted, and buried the others. The second was exiled to an island, where he wrote the first catalogue of Korean marine life. The third was beheaded, and the catechism he wrote in the vernacular kept the church alive for thirty-three years without a priest. The fourth recanted, survived, and became the most quoted thinker Korea has produced. Their children walked to Beijing and back for twenty years to ask for a priest, wrote to the Pope, and got one.Built from interrogation records, a survivor’s private papers, and testimony collected from the last people who remembered, The House at Majae is the history of the only church in the world assembled by laypeople out of books, and of what it cost the family who read them.Tae Ho Guak, MD is a Catholic neurologist in Korea and the author of The God Neuroscience Found. He lives an hour downriver from Majae. Riche Books.
