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Maryvale Alumnus and Adjunct Staff Member Appointed to Lead the Only Catholic University in China

Warmest congratulations from all at Maryvale Institute to Professor Stephen Morgan, an alumnus of the BA (Divinity) programme and, since 2012, an adjunct lecturer in Liturgy and Sacraments on the Ecclesiastical Bachelor of Divinity programme at Maryvale, has been appointed Rector of the University of Saint Joseph, Macao, where he has been Dean of the Faculty of Religious Studies since 2018.

The University is the lineal descendant of the College of St Paul, founded in Macao in 1594 and where the first generation of Jesuit missionaries, including Matteo Ricci, studied. Its work transferred to the Seminary of St Joseph in the eighteenth-century and the University of Saint Joseph was established, by the Diocese of Macao and the Catholic University of Portugal in 1996 to incorporate the academic work of the Seminary and to provide a Catholic university. Macao was, until 1999, a territory administered by Portugal. It then returned to Chinese sovereignty as a Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China, under the ‘one country: two systems’ that also applies to the former British Colony of Hong Kong. The University teaches in English and attracts students from over 40 countries and staff from nearly sixty. The University recently hosted the first session of the Maryvale Certificate in Catechesis for English-speaking Catechists in Macao and will be offering the course in Chinese in the coming year.

After completing his degree at Maryvale, Stephen went on to study Ecclesiastical History at Oxford, where he then completed his doctorate in Theology with a thesis on the theology of the development of doctrine in the work of St John Henry Newman. Stephen is deacon of the Diocese of Portsmouth and served in the parishes of the New Forest until 2017 and then at Holy Family Southampton until his departure to the South China Coast, where he and his wife Caroline had lived in the 1990s. His book, John Henry Newman and the Hermeneutic of Continuity will be published by Catholic University of America Press later this year.