– Marco Carvalho
Bishop of Macau D. Stephen Lee Bun-sang has exhorted the students who graduated from the University of Saint Joseph to be of service “to China and to the world” in a speech he delivered last Saturday at the Grand Hall of the Macau Tower, during USJ’s 2019 Congregation.
The ipso facto chancellor of the University of Saint Joseph, Bishop Lee urged the new graduates to serve “with love and with generosity,” so that they will be able to fully understand their lives’ meaning and purpose: “To serve means to give. To give with love, with generosity without expecting rewards. I believe that when we choose to serve, only then we will understand that to serve is to begin to understand life’s meaning and purpose,” the leader of the Diocese of Macau asserted.
Generally, the graduates of Macau universities don’t have any problem whatsoever to find a job after they conclude their studies, but Bishop Lee Bun-sang claims that to serve the Special Administrative Region is no longer enough: “Many people now often say that they love Macau. It’s good that they love Macau, but that is not enough. Macau is too small. Your love is too small,” the chancellor of the University of Saint Joseph sustained. “Now we are talking about the Greater Bay Area, so we have to love China. Not only to love Macau, because that would be to reward a village mentality. Your love should be great enough to serve China, to serve the world,” Bishop Lee added.
The University of Saint Joseph 2019 Congregation was divided into two sessions – one held in the morning, the other in the afternoon – to accommodate a total of 370 graduates and over one thousand witnesses.
In the morning session, the Rector of the University of Saint Joseph, Father Peter Stilwell, conferred two PhD Degrees in the area of Creative Industries. That same ceremony also saw the conferral of 29 Master Degrees, 159 Bachelor Degrees and the award of 23 Associate Diplomas. In the second session of the day, held in the afternoon, 157 Post-Graduate Diplomas in Education were awarded: “To me, the most remarkable thing about this group of graduates, is the great variety of courses and careers that they represent. We can find in this group several different visions about the problems that affect the world and as many ways to tackle them and this diversity is something that matches quite perfectly USJ’s vocation,” Father Stilwell says. “The University has been able to make its students think outside the boundaries of the specific disciplines they were studying. We encourage them to think of the world as a plural, multi-faceted place. A place that requires more and more plural and multi-faceted answers,” the rector of the University of Saint Joseph added.
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