Hong Kong (AsiaNews) The Catholic Church in Hong Kong is setting up a Catholic Study Centre at a public university to promote dialogue between Catholicism and Chinese culture.
The decision comes after the local Catholic Diocese and the Chinese University of Hong Kong, a prestigious public university whose focus is Chinese culture, recently agreed to establish a Catholic Study Centre.
Some Hong Kong universities already offer programmes and courses enabling students to better understand the Catholic faith, but the new Study Centre would be the first to involve the Diocese.
Under the agreement, it will be part of the Department of Cultural and Religious Studies in the Faculty of Arts.
The Hong Kong Diocese will donate HK$ 7,000,000 ( 750,000, US$ 910,000) to the University.
The joint project, which runs for 5 years, will recruit full-time research fellows for organising academic activities and for publications.
There will be visiting scholars and academic exchange schemes that would invite prominent scholars from mainland China and overseas.
The Catholic Centre will offer scholarship to MPhil and PhD students and set up Catholic research programmes. Enrolments are expected to begin in September 2006.
The University has similar joint programmes with the Buddhist and the Taoist communities in Taiwan and Hong Kong respectively.
The Centre is expected to become a platform for cultural debate between academics in mainland China and Catholic scholars and serve as a place for inter-religious exchange thanks to the presence of a number of academics with different faiths and research interests in religious studies.