Paul Chong Hasang, Augustine Yu Chin-gil and Charles Cho Shin-chol had made several visits to Beijing in order to find ways of introducing missionaries into Korea. Since the persecution of 1801, there had been no priest to care for the Catholic community. Serious dangers awaited the missionaries who dared to enter Korea. The bishops and priests who confronted this danger, as well as the laypeople who aided and sheltered them, were in constant threat of losing their lives. Bishop Laurent Imbert and ten other French missionaries were the first Paris Foreign Missions Society priests to enter Korea and to embrace a different culture. During the daytime, they stayed in hiding, but at night they traveled about on foot attending to the spiritual needs of the faithful and administering the sacraments. The first Korean Catholic priest, Andrew Kim Taegŏn, succeeded in entering Korea as a missionary. However, thirteen months after his ordination he was put to death by the sword in 1846 at the age of 26. The Catholics gathering in one place with no distinction on the basis of class were perceived to undermine "hierarchical Confucianism", the ideology which held the state together. The new learning was seen to be subversive of the establishment and this gave rise to systematic suppression and persecution. The suffering the believers endured is well known through official documents which detail trials and the sentences. There were four major persecutions – the last one in 1866, at which time there were only 20,000 Catholics in Korea. (Other Christian denominations did not enter Korea until sometime later). The vast majority of the martyrs were laypeople. Recognition More than 10,000 martyrs died in persecutions which extended over more than one hundred years. Of all these martyrs, seventy-nine were beatified in 1925. Twenty-four others were beatified on 6 October 1968. They had died in the persecutions of 1839 (Ki-hae persecution), 1846 (Pyong-o persecution) and 1866 (Pyong-in persecution). All together, 103 martyrs were canonized by Pope John Paul II on 6 May 1984. In breaking tradition, the ceremony did not take place in Rome but Seoul. Their feast day is September 20. From the last letter of Andrew Kim Taegŏn to his parish as he awaited martyrdom with a group of twenty persons: In the early 1870s, Father Claude-Charles Dallet compiled a comprehensive history of the Catholic Church in Korea, largely from the manuscripts of martyred Bishop Antoine Daveluy.