St. Joseph’s Seminary and Church

St. Joseph’s Seminary and Church

St. Joseph’s Seminary and Church in Macau is located on the Largo de Santo Agostinho in Macau. In 2005, it was inscribed as part of the Historic Centre of Macau on the UNESCO World Heritage List.

The exact founding date of the seminary is unknown, but historical records indicate that Jesuit missionaries acquired the current site in 1728. After thirty years of development, the seminary buildings were gradually completed. The seminary was specifically dedicated to training clergy for missionary work in China and Southeast Asia. The adjacent St. Joseph’s Church was built in 1746 and completed in 1758. Its scale is second only to the Church of St. Paul (the predecessor of the Ruins of St. Paul’s), which was built by the Jesuits, hence locals commonly refer to it as “São Paulo’s Little Brother” (三巴仔). The seminary once served as one of the campuses of St. Joseph’s Diocesan School, but it has not enrolled students since the 1960s.

During renovations in 1953, the exterior facade of the church was covered with a stucco finish, which damaged its original appearance. Later, the dome of the church developed a crack from the middle, which was repaired by the Macao Cultural Affairs Bureau and reopened to the public in 1999. The seminary section is not open to the public. The arm bone of St. Francis Xavier, originally kept on Coloane Island, was also moved here.

The seminary church is in the Baroque style. The facade has three entrances, and the main hall is laid out in a Latin cross shape, with a long axis of 27 meters and a short axis of 16 meters. At either end of the long axis are the entrance foyer and the main altar. The altar houses the image of its patron saint (St. Joseph), richly decorated, among which the two sets of four spiral columns wrapped with golden leaves are the most distinctive, and their capitals terminate in broken pediments. Corresponding to these are the four wooden spiral columns in the entrance foyer, which support the second-floor choir loft. These columns originally came from the Church of St. Francis. Four arches form a square space with inwardly curved sides, topped by a Roman-style dome with a diameter of 12.5 meters and a height of 19 meters. The dome has three rings of windows—16 in each ring. The top ring consists of false windows, while the other two rings serve for ventilation and lighting. The interior of the dome is white, with the yellow emblem of the Jesuits in the center.

The main facade of the church is a robust wall, 24.6 meters wide and 19 meters high, roughly divided into upper and lower, left and right sections, each in three parts. The top level on both sides features symmetrical bell towers with glazed tile roofs. The left bell tower has three window openings housing large bronze bells, while the front window of the left tower also contains a bronze bell and a small door leading to the rooftop. The central pediment features a carved emblem of the Jesuits.