One Person Households

 

The Catholic Peace Weekly, in one of its recent issues, looked at those living alone in Seoul Society and what this will mean for the future.
 

One-person households living alone have become the dominant form of housing in Seoul. Indicating that the family landscape of Seoul, with a population of 10 million, is changing. Since Seoul is at the forefront of these changes, the four dioceses concentrated in the metropolitan area (Seoul, Incheon, Suwon, Uijeongbu), which hold 55.9% of all Catholic believers, also appear to be directly affected by changes in family structures. 

Last year, single-person households in Seoul accounted for approximately 1.66 million households, or 39.9% of the total, making them the most common type, followed by two-person households (26.2%) and four-person households (12.3%). The number of single-person households in Seoul increased by 48.9%, from 1,115,744 households in 2015 to 1,660,813 households last year. 

As the population ages, the proportion of households including older adults aged 65 or older also exceeded 30%. The 'living-alone household' has become a model of residential patterns in South Korea.
 

Alongside this, the number of 'non-family households'—where people live with friends or coworkers instead of family—has more than doubled, rising from approximately 60,000 households in 2016 to about 120,000 households in 2024. This increase in cases where friends or colleagues who are not bound by marriage or blood ties share housing demonstrates that household structures are diversifying beyond the traditional family unit. 

This rapid shift in household structures and societal changes necessitates corresponding adjustments in church pastoral care. Particularly amid the surge in single-person households, there are persistent calls for the Korean Church to focus not only on pastoral care for elderly individuals living alone but also on the characteristics and circumstances of young and middle-aged single-person households. 

However, change within the Church has been slow. This is because the Korean Church has historically focused its pastoral efforts on family-centered ministry rooted in traditional lifestyles. The Director of the Korean Catholic Culture Research Institute emphasized in an interview: "Traditionally, church pastoral care has focused solely on 'normal' families with parents and children. We must now research and develop pastoral programs for single-person households and prepare ways to implement them in parishes." 

The Korean Catholic Pastoral Research Institute of the Bishops' Conference diagnosed in its' Analysis Report on Statistics of the Catholic Church in Korea 2024': "Having gone through the pandemic period, Korean society is becoming more fragmented and individualized than in the past," adding, "In an era already venerating individualism as the ideology of the times, this fragmentation is becoming a constant." 

The Final Document of the 16th Ordinary General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops challenged the "deepening isolation among people and the culture of individualism that has sometimes infiltrated even the Church," calling us "to mutual care, interdependence, and shared responsibility for the common good" and urging the Church to address this.