Siméon-François Berneux
French Roman Catholic missioner, bishop and saint (1814-1866)
Siméon-François Berneux (14 May 1814 – 8 March 1866) was a French Catholic missionary to Asia, and a member of the Paris Foreign Missions Society who was canonized as a saint. Berneux was executed in the anti-Christian purges at Saenamteo, Seoul, Korea, in 1866. His death provoked the French campaign against Korea the same year, which led to Korea reinforcing its ongoing policy of isolationism.
Biography
Siméon-François Berneux was born in Château-du-Loir on 14 May 1814 and entered the Seminary of Foreign Missions in 1831 at the age of seventeen. In 1833 he entered the Seminary of Le Mans to complete his studies. He was ordained on 20 May 1837 and appointed as Professor of Theology at the Foreign Missions Seminary in October 1838.
Berneux departed from Le Havre on 12 February 1840 and arrived at Anyer in Java on 31 May. He spent the summer in Manila before sailing to Macau. In January 1841 he sailed to Tonkin. In Vietnam he was imprisoned and taken to Huế for trial, where he arrived on 28 May.
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This entry incorporates text from “Siméon-François Berneux” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.