Persecution of Christ in the DPRK
KoreanCatholic's Jason Choi passed this along to me: Number one target in North Korea: Christians.

Here's the situation up north:

At present there is only one Catholic church in the country, in the capital city of Pyongyang. The whereabouts of the Bishop of Pyongyang, Msgr. Francis Hong Yong-ho, and 50 priests, remains unknown. There are an estimated 3,000 Catholics in the country who mostly practice their faith at home, with no priests available to them.

Father Joseph Veneroso, M.M., who visited North Korea in 1989, said, “They can’t have any public display of religion. Even if they have a crucifix in their home, it’s in a place where nobody else might see it except for them.”

Whatever religious activity takes place is staged by the government for the benefit of foreigners. During Father Veneroso’s visit, he was permitted to say three Masses in the country’s only Catholic Church.

“The church was filled, but we’re not sure if it was filled because the government told [the people] to come out. But they knew all the songs by heart even though they didn’t have any hymnals. They sang them from memory. And they knew all the responses to the Mass.”

My friend Jason points out a problen in what Fr. Veneroso says:

How can they remember the mass, since the Novus Ordo Mass didn't exist for them? Because of the Vatican II reforms in the 1960s it's impossible for N. Koreans to have learned the new mass since they've been closed off from the international world since 1953....

My bet is that a bunch of people were probably forced to remember all the responses before Mass was said. Someone I know went to a protestant church in n. korea and the church service seemed legit. After the service he asked a simple question to a n korean church goer about heaven, and the person had no idea what he was talk'n about.