College General, Tanjung Bungah

College General (23 December 2020)


College General (GPS: 5.46123, 100.30176) is a Catholic theological seminary in Tanjong Bungah, Penang. It has its entrance at Jalan Cengai.

College General has a very long history that traces the presence of the Catholics in the Far East. The college is managed by the Paris Foreign Mi8ssions Society (Société des Missions étrangères de Paris, or M.E.P.), a society of secular priests and lay persons founded in 1658-63¹ dedicated to carrying out missionary work in foreign lands.

The earliest presence of the Catholic missionary work is believed to be the Seminary of the Holy Angels, which was established in Ayutthaya, then capital of Siam, in 1665 by Vicars Apostolic Bishops Pallu and Lambert de la Motte.². The political upheavals of a turbulent Asia forced the seminary to relocate anumber of times, to Chanthaburi in Thailand, to Hondat in Cambodia and Pondicherry, India, was seriously considered but passed. This forced the seminary to be closed while a new site was sought.

The College General's debut in Penang began early. Interest was ignited as soon as Captain Francis Light moved to set up the British settlement in 1786. In the following years, the Catholic missionaries set up raising funds for the eventual setting up of a seminary there. This came into being in 1809, when the college was realised with an initial group of twenty Chinese seminarians. The site was Pulau Tikus, where the early Eurasians of Penang had settled.

The College General was to remain at its founding premises in Pulau Tikus for a total of 176 years. But by 1984, the buildings in Pulau Tikus is determined to have becoming too run down, and a decide was made to relocate the college to Mariophile, which up till then had served as the holiday villa for the seminary. Located in Tanjong Bungah, three kilometers from Pulau Tikus, Mariophile was spruced up with new buildings, where were completed for occupation in 1989. A hall, a library, more classrooms, a communications resource centre, a lecture hall and administrative offices were added to the complex in 1994.². The College General continues to operate at Mariophile in Tanjung Bungah today. A large portion of Jalan Cengai is within the grounds of the college.

College General is on the Map of Tanjung Bungah

References

College General, Tanjung Bungah (9 February 2015)

List of Colleges in Penang and Colleges in Malaysia