Jasmin Yiu
The Catholic Pilgrimage Service of Macau (CPSM) is a non-profit-making group in Macau. Established in 2007, CPSM provides a variety of pilgrimage services and events to promote and enhance people’s knowledge of the history, culture and heritage of the Catholic Church in Macau.
Since 2007, CPSM has organized different courses on church-guide training, in order to invite more people to help in promoting church history to tourists and faithful. However, in order to attract more volunteers to help in this professional service, CPSM has started an intensive guide course for St Lawrence Church and has now formed a team of ten people, to provide Church guiding service every Sunday afternoon.
Mrs Lei Leong Iong Keng, head committee of CPSM as well as guiding coach, told O CLARIM that they have just organized another session of guide training intensive course at St Joseph’s Seminary Church from 9-13 July. “There are many rich carvings of Baroque style inside the church, so I have a desire to share this information with others, letting them know more about the churches in Macau,” added Mrs Lei.
Mrs Lei said that the experience of wanting to start CPSM came from a traveling experience many years back, “when looking back to our Macau churches, which are very beautiful and historical, I started questioning whether there is someone introducing the information and history of the churches to the tourists?” Hence, she suggested to the diocese to start CPSM, and went to earn a professional diploma at the Institute for Tourism Studies.
Eager to pass on the torch, Mrs Lei hopes there will be more people, especially younger ones, who will join this professional work to serve the church. She said, “If there are more young people, I believe their inspiration and thoughts will be more lively and energetic, they will have more guts and confidence in trying or innovate. Therefore, passing the torch is also one of my goals at the moment.”
Volunteers: a way of spending time for God
Several volunteer guides at St Lawrence also shared their thoughts and challenges with O CLARIM regarding the service. Irene Lei, one of the volunteers shared that there was a time when she worked so hard and felt lost in her life as well as her faith, but her point of view changed completely after joining a pilgrimage tour.
Irene said, “The tour guide introduced a lot of ideas, and he used many quotes from the Bible. Though I was baptized long ago, my knowledge [of Bible and my faith] was very shallow. This course was a chance to enrich my faith, and to know more about the church in Macau. Most importantly, as Catholics, although we are very busy, we should also spend more time for God, for the service of God and of the Church.” She added that it was her responsibility to let people know more about the Church.
Another volunteer Annie Liu describe this as an opportunity of doing apostolate: “The tourists can have an opportunity to learn about a church through a guided tour. At the same time, I would like to tell them that Macau is not only a city of gambling, but there are many historical architectures and heritages.” Moreover, she thinks she can learn from the patron saints while researching and preparing for the service, which is another way of practicing and deepening her own faith.
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