It is the honor of Cheng Yu Tung College (CYTC) to have the renowned historian Prof. Tang Kai-Jian to give a speech on “The History and Development of Catholicism through the review of Seminário e Igreja de São José” on January 17th, 2017. Prof. Tang is the full professor in the Department of History of UM and he is dedicated to doing the research of Macau history since 1992.


The speech was held in G012 of CYTC, gathering a total of 103 student and teachers. Prof. Tang first elaborated the connection of “Ruínas da Antiga Catedral de São Paulo” and “Seminário e Igreja de São José” to let the audience understand they were both catholic churches for cultivating priests. Nowadays Chinese people call them “Da San Ba” and “Xiao San Ba” respectively based on the different sizes of these two churches. Then Prof. Tang shared lots of history facts on the development of Seminário e Igreja de São José, telling how church education effectd local and non-local people and culivated great priests and people such as politicians, linguists and Mandarian lexicographer in the history. He also pointed out politics had a huge impact on the development of Catholicism for over 200 years because Portuguese government kept expelling teachers who were non Portuguese priests from Macau in order to keep their colonial sovereignty. Therefore it somehow made Macau lose the chance to build a thorough and systematic religious education or normal education.


This interesting and intellectual talk lasted for 1.5 hours and students asked a variety of questions, being curious of education systems at that time and how Catholicism still effects today’s Macau, China and even the whole Asia. All the participants undoubtedly learned a lot from Prof. Tang’s talk.

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