Pope Francis on Thursday appointed a new archbishop for the archdioceses of Seoul, South Korea.
Bishop Peter Chung Soon-Taick, a member of the Order of Discalced Carmelites, has been an auxiliary bishop of Seoul since December 2013.
The 60-year-old bishop was born in Daegu, southeastern South Korea, and studied chemical engineering before entering seminary. He was ordained a priest in the Order of Discalced Carmelites in 1992.
The archbishop-elect also studied Sacred Scripture at the graduate level at the Pontifical Biblical Institute in Rome and was provincial definitor of the Order of Discalced Carmelites in Korea.
From 2009 to 2013, he was definitor general of the Discalced Carmelites in the general curia in Rome for the Far East and Oceania.
The Metropolitan Archdiocese of Seoul covers 6,701 square miles and serves 1.5 million Catholics, 15% of the population, according to 2017 statistics. The total population of the area is 9.9 million.
In 2017, the archdiocese had nearly 1,000 priests, 756 of whom were diocesan, and 2,367 men and women religious.
On October 29, Pope Francis will meet the president of South Korea, Moon Jae-in. When the two met for the first time in 2018, Moon told Pope Francis: “I come to you as president of South Korea, but also as a Catholic. My baptismal name is Timothy.”
