North Korean abbey speaks through its architecture

It has been said architecture is the most political of the arts, as architecture theorist John Ruskin once emphasized. This is because architecture imposes upon people a vision of man and culture, revealing interior aims. 

The arts have served, and continue to serve, political as well as religious purposes. This is most evident in the contrast between Catholic and Marxist architecture. 

One of the first things travelers from the West notice when they arrive in communist or former communist countries is the stark “uglification” of buildings built by regimes. 

Soviet urban planning has left its permanent mark in countries like Russia, Ukraine, China, and North Korea.

Marxist architecture affirms what is at the core of its doctrine: soullessness and godlessness, reflected in miles upon miles of rows of steel grey reinforced concrete, gigantic apartment flats, shops, factories, and work buildings. 

Marxists have always been functionalists. Communist architecture reflects a world wholly under the aspect of function, where the mind exists without the soul. Architecture is reduced in some sense to a piece of machinery. 

The intellectual basis of Marxist thought shows forth very clearly – man seen primarily in terms of his utility. Catholic architecture, on the other hand, speaks of permanence of life, removed from the world of decay and despair; it speaks of life become divine. 

The Catholic Church places an emphasis on the sacred and this is at the foundation of its understanding of built forms. Church buildings display a divine apartness, displaying a cognitive understanding of aesthetic values. The language of the temple informs the ancient city. 

The primacy of aesthetic values are implicit in all Catholic thought, and Catholic architects place aesthetic considerations at the heart of the building activity. Marxism has removed aesthetic considerations from the centre of architectural thought and banished them to the periphery.      

A simple, quasi-scientific mode of functional experiment is how history will judge the Marxist contribution to the building arts – with function as the only essential feature of a building.

In the Benedictine tradition, aesthetic standards are handled with the highest aims, seeking to uplift the beholder by a secret harmony in the proportions. This is why Catholic monasteries have always been profoundly classicist in their construction.

Catholic monastic architecture, whether Gothic or Romanesque, Baroque or other, is able to express in words the beauties of proportion, harmony, immovability, atmosphere, symmetry, ornament, space, imagination and more.

Studies have shown a human preference for these forms in terms of the organization of the optic nerves in the human brain. The sense of beauty is a distinct and autonomous function of the human mind. In fact, it can be said, what is possible in architecture is determined by the extent of religious competence. 

The whole force and reason of design consists in finding an exact and correct way of adapting and joining together the lines and angles which serve to define the noble aspect of the building.

This brings to mind the former Tokwon Abbey of St. Benedict in North Korea. It is still standing today, located just north of the port town of Wonsan, on the eastern side of Korea.

Tokwon was a Benedictine monastery of the Congregation of Missionary Benedictines of St. Ottilien, who first arrived in Seoul in 1909. 

These Benedictines were special missionaries, originating in Germany in 1884. They were established with the expressed aim to combine the Benedictine way of life with activity in the mission field.

The story began in 1920 when the Vatican created the Apostolic Vicariate of Wonsan, with the monastery as its administrative and spiritual centre (it was raised to the status of an abbey in 1940).  

The monks established two abbeys in the region, one in Tokwon and the other in Yanji, China.  Both were later dissolved by the communist authorities.

In the 1920s they chose a beautiful location in North Korea for the new abbey, rural acreage very close to the Sea of Japan, with a view of cropland and mountains to the west and to the east the sea.

The monks constructed a fitting four-storey monastery complex with a matching neo-Romanesque chapel, all completed by the early 1930s. The property included a seminary and a nearby convent.  A carpentry shop and a trade school were also included.    

Parishioners of the monastery chapel were local farmers and fishermen, while monks of the abbey and the nuns came from numerous lands, including Germany and Switzerland, producing many indigenous vocations from North Korea.

The practice of territorial abbeys, a rare distinction in the Catholic world, arose to assist in the pastoral care of the faithful living in mission territory. Those living near the monastery, with few or no other parishes or sacramental support, were under the administrative authority of the abbot. 

At the end of the Second World War, the Soviets entered North Korea and occupied the monastery for a short time. In 1945, the Korean Peninsula was divided into two permanent zones along the 38th parallel, with the communists influencing and financing the North.    

In May 1949 a storm was brewing.  There were about 60 monks at the monastery and 20 nuns. Under the rule of Kim Il Sung, the first ruler of North Korea, a fierce persecution broke out against Christians and foreigners, including a fierce attack on Catholics. 

The North Korean secret police invaded the monastery and arrested the monks and nuns. Some were executed after having been sent to prisons and interment camps.

In June of 1950 North Korea invaded the South which led to the Korean War (1950-53).

In July 1950, the roof of the Abbey chapel was destroyed by American bombs. The interior of the chapel had not yet been completed. After the bombing, a new roof was installed by the communist government.

It was during this difficult time, from 1949 to 1952, that 14 monks and two sisters were executed after harsh imprisonment and torture. During the same period, 17 monks and two sisters died of starvation, illness, hard physical labour, and poor living conditions in the camps.

Even the Abbot-Bishop, Rev. Boniface Sauer, OSB, was not spared martyrdom. He was jailed and died in Pyongyang as a result of his imprisonment on Feb. 1, 1950. The senior monks were executed later that year in October 1950.

By God’s grace, in January 1954 the surviving 42 German monks and sisters were repatriated to Germany via the Trans-Siberian Railway.

The abbey and its grounds were converted by the communists into a university of agriculture, with additional new buildings constructed on the monastery grounds. 

Satellite images on Google Earth reveal the original buildings are still standing (39°11'38.0"N 127°22'25.0"E), though it remains unclear how exactly the old monastery is being used today.

In 1952, some surviving Benedictine monks and sisters founded a new monastery in South Korea, the Abbey of St. Maurus and St. Placidus, located in Waegwan, near Daegu. 

Today the Abbot of Waegwan is also the Apostolic Administrator of Tokwon Territorial Abbey, even though he is prohibited from visiting North Korea by the current regime. North Korea remains ecclesiastically united with South Korea, still composed of two vacant dioceses and the abandoned territorial abbey.

Although the bitter persecution of Catholics in North Korea since 1949 has made church activity impossible, nevertheless, the Holy See has seen fit to keep the Abbey formally in existence as one of the few remaining territorial abbeys of the world.

Korea is a land of martyrs.  In fact, it has the fourth-largest number of canonized saints in the Catholic Church since 1984 as categorized by nation, a number which includes many martyrs. 

In May 2007 the beatification process began for the 36 North Korean Servants of God martyred from the abbey during the wave of anti-Christian persecution under the rule of Kim Il Sung. The saintly martyrs include Abbot-Bishop Sauer, Father Benedict Kim, OSB, and their companions. 

It is estimated about 5,000 Catholics remain in North Korea today.    

Catholic monasteries aim to stand as the visible symbol of historical continuity and equally as the enforced announcement of God’s presence in this world. The buildings are in part a realization for perpetuity of the inner life, making intelligible what is otherwise not seen. 

The classic monastery is not an enclosure, but a precinct. It is a preamble to the city and its interchange is sacred and removed from it. It is born from the concept of temple, the visible licence to pray, a boundary between two worlds.  

Churches are built, causing themselves to stand as people do. The buildings have posture, reaching upright and immovable and even pronouncing a dialogue with sky and earth, with those who believe and those who do not. 

Pray this great abbey, never forgotten, will one day be restored to its rightful place as an active missionary abbey. 

The monastery still stands, speaking a language of its own, which brings to mind a quote from the German philosopher Schiller: “Mankind has lost its dignity, but art has recovered it and conserved it in significant stones.”

 J.P. Sonnen is a tour operator and history docent with Vancouver-based Orbis Catholicus Travel.