Photo: Ana Marques
– Marco Carvalho
Welshman Stephen Morgan is the new dean of the Faculty of Religious Studies at the University of St Joseph. A permanent deacon and until recently Oeconomus of the Diocese of Portsmouth, in England, Morgan wants to attract to the Faculty a wider variety of students, among them a larger number of lay pupils. The Church, he maintains, has nothing to lose with a well educated laity. Here’s Stephen Morgan in his own words.
You have been until very recently the Oeconomus of the Diocese of Portsmouth. Now you embrace a new challenge. Which task is more difficult? To run the house of God? Or take care of the People of God?
Well, I think being at the service of the People of God is at the heart of being a good Oeconomus. In the Portsmouth Diocese I was the de facto Chief Operating Officer of the diocesan charity. We had 250 employees. I had 15 people answering directly to me and, so, working with people was always part of what I did. Nevertheless, I’ve always had an interest in academic work. I did a doctorate at Oxford and then taught in Oxford and at the Maryvale Institute, in England. I had limited opportunities to do academic work, to do teaching, to do research but coming to Macau gives me an opportunity to bring together my administrative skills with my desire to teach, to research, and to write theology. So, for me, in many respects, it’s a very fortunate coming together of various threads of my experience and expertise. It does mean a move halfway across the world, but I was in Hong Kong from 1991 to 1995, so I know something of this part of the world. The most difficult part is that my wife and children will remain in England for a great deal of the time. My wife has a job and my children are fast growing up: two are at the university and one is working. Nevertheless, I consider myself to be very privileged to be asked by Bishop Lee to come and do this work and I am very grateful to my own Bishop, Bishop Philip Egan, for allowing me to come.
You are a deacon. Is there any inherent message in appointing a deacon as Dean of the Faculty? Perhaps that this kind of institution is not directed only to prepare new priests anymore …
No, they aren’t. My immediate predecessor, Professor Monera, is a layman. He is not a priest or a deacon. He has been very keen to broaden the range of those taking advantage of the courses at the Faculty of Religious Studies (“FRS”) to include lay faithful. The idea, very much, is that the FRS should – yes – be a place for forming priests and religious – we have the Dominican sisters and the Dominican brothers, as well as the seminarians – but also that lay people who have the capability of doing university level studies in theology should do so. We have a number of lay students in the FRS already, including a married couple who are beginning the Bachelor of Christian Studies this year. I hope there will be many more in years to come. My doctoral work was on the theology of an Englishman called Blessed John Henry Newman. In 1851 Newman wrote “I want a laity who know their religion, who enter into it, who know their creed so well that they can give an account of it…I want an intelligent, well instructed laity.” (JHN, Present Position of Catholics in England, p390). I think the church in Macau, the church in Asia, the Church throughout the world desperately needs a well-educated laity and I’m only pleased to be a part of that.
That might be the very own future of the Church? A Church that has its front soldiers in persons who can understand in a more profound and rigorous way the Word of God?
I think that in terms of the Church’s missionary activity to the world, an educated laity is absolutely essential. I’m reminded of another of Newman’s phrases: when somebody asked him why he was so concerned about the laity, he said the Church would look pretty silly without them. He is quite right. The work of priests and of religious has been of incalculable in spreading the faith, but we all know from our own lives that it is usually lay people who give us our first lessons in the faith: it’s usually our parents. They are our first teachers. They are the primary educators in the ways of faith and in the ways of life. It is important that we have well educated lay people. The Second Vatican Council says that lay people have – the Latin expression is an “indoles saecularis” – a worldly expertise. They understand what it is to live in the world and they have a proper sphere of expertise which those of us that live and work in the Church can be, somewhat, removed from. It is very important to have lay people who understand their faith, able to communicate to other lay people. They can then be the best missionaries.
Are lay people more able to understand some of the challenges that the Catholic Church faces nowadays?
Maybe not better able to understand at an intellectual level, but sometimes at an experiential level. They understand from their own daily lives the particular challenges of living with faith the challenges of the Gospel. Priests certainly understand that from their role as pastors, but we have a vision of the Church, I think, that was given to us by the saints and that the Second Vatican Council reminded us of: we understand bishops and priests and deacons as being there to serve the lay faithful. Saint Augustine, that great fourth, fifth century bishop from North Africa, was famous for saying “With you I am a Christian. For you I am Bishop.” I would say to lay people here in Macau “With you I am a Christian. For you I am deacon.” I think that’s how I would see it. That’s how I think it works.
You were mentioning that the main role of the Faculty of Religious Studies is still to prepare new priests, to prepare new vocations. What is currently the panorama here in Macau? How many of the students currently enrolled intend to make the ultimate commitment with God?
Eighty percent of the students in the Faculty are students either for male or female religious orders or for the seminary at the Diocese. Bishop Lee established a new seminary and we have six seminarians there. One has completed his academic formation, although he will take some more classes. The other five from the seminary will be within the Faculty of Religious Studies, three of them beginning their studies in Philosophy and two of them, who previously studied Philosophy, are beginning their studies in Theology.
None of them from Macau?
No. Some of them are indeed from Macau. The student who finished his academic studies is from Macau and one of the students going into Philosophy is also from Macau. Two of the other students are from Hong Kong, one from the Philippines and one from Portugal. In many ways, the Seminary is like Macau in miniature.
Forty or fifty years ago most of the thinkers and the philosophers were keen on saying that God was dead and that religion was dead, but we are witnessing the opposite thing. We are witnessing a revival, a deeper approach to faith. Is the same happening in Macau? Can it happen in Macau? Macau is often depicted as a city of vice and sin …
Saint Paul says that “where sin abounds, grace abound yet more fully”(Roman 5:20). I have only been in here for a very short time, but I see already in the faith of the Catholics here in Macau: a great fervour, a great enthusiasm for their faith, a great pride in their faith. That’s really a very encouraging thing for someone that comes from Europe, a place which is becoming a desert for the faith. Europe, which was, in many respects, at the heart of the Catholic faith over the last thousand years, has in many ways experienced a great drought, a great famine of faith in recent years. It is quite difficult there to be hopeful, to be enthusiastic. The great Pope St John Paul II and his immediate successor, Pope Benedict, spoke particularly to the cultural challenges of European Christianity. It was always very difficult to be optimistic about the Church in Europe. I think it is much easier to be optimistic about the Church in Asia. The Church in Asia is young, not just in terms of the length of its history – although we are in Macau: this diocese is three, four times older than my own diocese in England – but here many of the people are young. The age of the people at Mass here is half the average age of the people at Mass in England and that is a very hopeful sign.
How can that “desert of faith” can be contradicted in Europe. Is there anything that can be done in order to attract the younger generations?
Yes. The fundamental text in the Sacred Scripture for Evangelization is in the first lecture of Saint Peter, in the third chapter, in the fifteenth verse. There Saint Peter writes “Always be ready to give an explanation of the hope that is in you.” The way that the Faith will be restored in Europe, is in the same way it was restored in the period after the collapse of the Roman Empire: through faithfulness. We have to live in such a way that manifests our hope in Jesus Christ to people. Each one of us has to live it in such a way they ask themselves the question: “Why is this person different? Why do these people live like this? Why has this man, why has this woman got this hope?” If we live like that, people, then will ask that question of St Peter and then we need to be ready to explain the answer. That’s why theologically educating the laity is so important, whether that be through Bible studies, through Catechism classes or through organizations like the Newman Institute or even at university level, through the Faculty of Religious Studies at the University of St Joseph here in Macau. That’s certainly how it will happen in Europe and, certainly, how it will happen here.
China is still in a very raw state in terms of evangelization. There’s an ongoing dialogue between China and the Vatican. For a man of faith, like yourself, is it tempting to work in a place like Macau and China?
It’s very tempting to work in a place like Macau, maybe even China. China has a very long Christian history, which we often forgot. As I understand it, there have been Christians in China certainly for fourteen hundred years. And we know that the Church in China is experiencing all kinds of challenging situations. The political circumstances within which the Church operates in China are often very complicated and very subtle. I have not been here long enough, really, to be able to say anything that may be in any sense useful about this, except to observe that Chinese people make up fully one fifth of the world’s population. God loves them very much and will want them all to hear the good news of Jesus Christ. If I can be part of helping that, even in a very little way, in this corner of China, then I am very happy to do so.
As you were saying, your mission as the Dean of the Faculty of Religious Studies is just beginning. In a prospective way, what would you like to achieve with this new challenge?
It is always a great blessing to follow people who have done such great good work and in this sense I find myself standing in the shoulders of my predecessors. But I think I would like to see the FRS be successful in attracting many more students: more lay students, a wider range of students. I would like to see the FRS develop its course offerings, so that people who might not be able to afford the time for full-time university studies might be able to benefit from some of the theological expertise that exists here. I know that some of the faculty members have been involved in that in the past and some are involved with it in the present. I would also like to see more post-graduate students and I would like to strengthen the relationship between the faculty and it’s mother Faculty, the Theology Faculty of the Universidade Católica Portuguesa.
The Catholic community here in Macau is no longer an homogenous one. We are not talking anymore just about Portuguese, Macanese and Chinese Catholics. We also have a huge Filipino community. Is this a challenge also for someone that comes to Macau and tries to understand the reality of Catholicism in Macau?
Yes, it is: although the universal nature of the Church is becoming more obvious throughout the world. It’s happening everywhere: one third of American Catholics is now latino. My own parish, in England, the parish that I came from, Holy Family in Southampton, had a very large number of first generation immigrants and a very small number of Europeans. In fact in the parish most of those who were European weren’t ethnically British or Irish but came from Poland and Lithuania. We had parishioners were from Kerala – they were Syro-Malabar Catholics rather than Latin Rite Catholics. We had Latin Catholics from Goa, we had Filipinos, we had Vietnamese, we had a large West-African population, from Nigeria and from Cameroon, and we even had some from East Africa, from Uganda. This is the reality of the Church today all over. It always amuses me that, at precisely the time that we start to experience this large scale movement of peoples, we abandoned the use of a common language in the liturgy. For example, during the Patronal Feast in the Cathedral, on Saturday, we had a liturgy in which we had readings in English – although it was English with a very Filipino accent – and in Portuguese and Chinese. We had music in Chinese and in English and in Latin. I am a Welshman: I am not English. We didn’t have any Welsh. It would have been nice to have heard some of yr hen iaith, (the old tongue: Welsh), but maybe I am just too small a minority.
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