Ayutthaya, Siam
Bishops Pierre Lambert de la Motte and Francois Pallu of the Paris Foreign Missions Society found the Seminary of Saint Joseph on the river Menam, on land granted by King Narai.
The Seminary
Three hundred and sixty years, in full.
The short version lives on the homepage. This is the whole account: the founding, the exile, the twenty-five years the college spent closed, and everything it became after.
Ayutthaya, Siam, in the seventeenth century.
Four countries. One hundred and forty-four years, with a generation of silence in the middle.
Founded on a river in Siam, driven out by invasion, closed for twenty-five years, and reestablished at last on an island in the Strait of Malacca. Follow it.
The voyage
01 / 08
Persecution
Tensions rise in Siam. Missionaries and seminarians are imprisoned. The first sign of what this college would come to be known for.
Chanthaburi
Burmese forces invade Ayutthaya. The college abandons its foundation and begins a pilgrimage of survival, first along the gulf coast.
Hon Dat
Driven on again, the seminary crosses into the delta. Students and formators carry the college with them; there is no building, only the community.
Pondicherry, India
The long sea passage around the peninsula ends at the French settlement on the Coromandel coast. The college survives, three and a half thousand kilometres from where it began.
Closed
Pondicherry is safe, but too far from the young men of Asia it exists to serve. The college closes its doors. It will not reopen for twenty-five years.
The search for a home
Fr. Claude Francois Letondal raises funds as far as Mexico and scouts the region for a new site. Manila is caught in European rivalries; Dutch Malacca offers no security. British Penang does.
Penang, Pulau Tikus
Fr. Lolivier reopens the college with a small band of Chinese seminarians. Within days their belongings are stolen. He stays. By 1810 the college has its official recognition, and at last, a lasting home.
From a mission college to a regional seminary.
For its first three centuries the seminary taught in Latin, a single tongue for men who otherwise had none in common. In 1966, English took its place as the language of instruction, and seminarians were free to speak their own languages between classes.
Governance shifted too. Authority that once sat with the Vicar Apostolic of Ayutthaya, and later with the Paris board of the Missions Society, passed by 1973 to the Episcopal Conference of the bishops of Malaysia and Singapore. The college had already affiliated with Rome's Pontifical Urbaniana University in 1965, letting its seminarians earn a Baccalaureate in Theology.
A hillside, not a heritage building.
By the 1980s the seminary's old ground in Pulau Tikus had been sold, the proceeds funding not just its own move but two new sister seminaries: St. Peter's College in Sarawak and St. Francis Xavier Major Seminary in Singapore. College General resettled at Mariophile in Tanjung Bungah, first in old wooden buildings left behind by the British military, then in residential quarters built by 1989 and a proper campus, library included, by 1992. The bishops blessed it formally in 1995, on the seminary's 330th anniversary.
Where formation begins, before Penang.
Men do not arrive at College General straight from home. Two minor seminaries carry the earliest stage of formation first.
Good Shepherd Seminary, Melaka
Opened in 1988 to house the Initiation Year, the very first year of formation, before a man ever reaches College General's philosophy classroom.
St. Peter's College, Kota Kinabalu
A second Initiation Year seminary followed in 2001. Since 2014 its seminarians have joined College General directly for their philosophy studies.
Fewer seminarians, and a wider net.
Enrolment fell in the early 2000s, and College General's own Theology faculty closed. Before 2005 its theology students studied at St. Francis Xavier Major Seminary in Singapore; from 2016, the arrangement settled into its current shape: philosophy at Penang, theology at St. Peter's College in Kuching. It was a smaller footprint, but a wider one too, seminarians from East and West Malaysia training side by side.
More than a thousand priests, and the College of Martyrs.
Since 1665, College General has formed more than a thousand priests, among them Cardinals Soter Fernandez, William Goh and Sebastian Francis. But its oldest title is a harder one: the College of Martyrs, earned by generations of seminarians and formators who faced persecution, and in some cases death, for the faith they were trained to carry. In 1988, Pope John Paul II canonised several of the Vietnamese martyrs associated with the college, including St. Philip Minh. Their relics rest today in the college chapel.
If the question keeps returning, it is worth answering.
Speak to the vocation director of your diocese, or write to the seminary. There is no obligation in asking.
Begin discernment
+604 890 2002
Jalan Cengai, Tanjung Tokong, Penang