Negotiating Plurality: Korean Catholic Funerals as Lived Religion

This article examines Korean Catholic funeral rites through the lenses of ritual guidebooks and lived religion, arguing that Catholic funerary practice in Korea has emerged through sustained engagement with Confucian and Buddhist tradi- tions as well as modern nationalism. Focusing on Catholic manuals such as the Sangjang yesik [Rites for Mourning and Funerals] and related texts, it traces how officially sanctioned liturgical forms coexist with, accommodate, and reinterpret indigenous ritual logics surrounding mourning, burial, ancestor veneration, and care for the dead. Rather than viewing Korean Catholic funerals as a simple localization of Roman rites, the article conceptualizes them as a dynamic ritual field in which multiple religious grammars operate simultaneously. Situating these practices historically, the study shows how early Korean Cath- olics negotiated ancestral rites, mourning customs, and local temporalities of death under persecution in Chosŏn Korea. In a society grounded in filial piety (hyo) and loyalty (ch’ung), the prohibition of ancestral rites rendered Catholic practice morally suspect and politically subversive. Under these constraints, lay Catholics developed distinctive funerary forms that embodied Catholic belief through familiar cultural idioms. Central among these is the yŏndo, a uniquely Korean tradition of funeral chanting that integrates Catholic prayer with in- digenous musical rhythms and communal mourning, emerging not through top-down inculturation but from vernacular practices shaped by everyday ex- periences of death and loss. Drawing on textual, ethnographic, and historical analysis, this article demonstrates how Korean Catholic funerals function as negotiated spaces in which religious plurality is ritually enacted and rendered meaningful.