The Catholic Church in North Korea retains a community of several hundred adherents who practice under the supervision of the state-established Korean Catholic Association (KCA) rather than the Roman Catholic hierarchy. The dioceses of the Church have remained vacant since Christian persecutions in the late 1940s. The most prominent congregation is that of Pyongyang, which meets at Changchung Cathedral. According to a KCA official, two other congregations exist. The state ideology of Juche has largely displaced Catholic faith, and full services are provided only to people with a Catholic family background. Most, if not all, religious formation of Catholics in the country occurs across the Tumen River in China, where North Koreans occasionally cross illegally to meet with family from the South. Some North Koreans are baptized on the Chinese side and return to Korea, practicing their faith in secrecy. History The first Catholic missionaries arrived in Korea in 1794, a decade after the return of Yi Sung-hun, a diplomat who was the first Korean to be baptized into the Catholic faith (which occurred in Beijing). He established a grassroots lay Catholic movement in the peninsula. However, the writings of the Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci, who was resident at the imperial court in Beijing, had been already brought to Korea from China in the seventeenth century. Scholars of the Silhak ("Practical Learning") were attracted to Catholic doctrines, and this was a key factor for the spread of the Catholic faith in the 1790s. The penetration of Western ideas and Christianity in Korea became known as Seohak ("Western Learning"). A study of 1801 found that more than half of the families that had converted to Catholicism were linked to the Silhak school. Largely because converts refused to perform Confucian ancestral rituals, the Joseon government prohibited the proselytization of Christianity. Some Catholics were executed during the early nineteenth century, but the restrictive law was not well enforced. A large number of Christians lived in the northern half of the peninsula where Confucian influence was not as strong as in the south. Before 1948, Pyongyang was an important Christian center: one-sixth of its population of about 300,000 people were Christian converts. The population of the Pyongyang diocese as of 1943 was 3,650,623, all ethnic Koreans. After the division of Korea, however, the Communist government under Kim Il-sung persecuted Christians as imperialist collaborators and spies. Much of the Catholic community was either killed or