Bachelor of Theology

General Norms

The Theologate at St. Joseph’s Catholic Major Seminary has been set up specifically for the education and formation of candidates to priesthood for the Catholic Church in Myanmar. Functioning as a national seminary it admits candidates from all Archdioceses and Dioceses in the nation. Candidates must have completed the required studies in Philosophy as well as a “Spiritual Year” before their admission to the Theologate. (cf.: CBCM decision in January 2000).

St. Joseph’s Catholic Major Seminary offers a four-year program to increase the seminarian’s own understanding of the faith and to provide him with tools and skills necessary to elucidate the principles of the faith for the people he will serve in the ordained ministry. The various disciplines within theology are covered in the curriculum: Sacred Scripture, Dogmatic theology, Moral theology, Spiritual theology, Pastoral theology, Liturgy, Canon Law, and Church history. Those students who have completed the courses required and have passed the examinations will be offered Bachelor Degree in Theology.

Marking of Examinations

Marks in examinations will be assigned as follows:

Diploma in Theological Studies for Catholic Laity

Catholic Church in Myanmar is taking initiatives in assisting people of God in every way possible proactively and reactively. Lay Catholics in Myanmar are in some extent taking key role to play in Church and they become to express interest in theological studies more and more. Signs of the time are somewhat urging the teaching staff in National Catholic Major Seminary to look beyond the seminary system and schedule, and open more the needs of Laity at large in terms of basic theological knowledge.

With that in mind, the teaching staff of St. Joseph’s National Catholic Major Seminary proposed the Catholic Bishop’s Conference of Myanmar (CBCM) to have a program for Catholic laity to have access to theological knowledge. That proposal was heartily appreciated by CBCM and it was decided that the program is to be carried out in coming 2019-2020 Academic Year. The approval letter written by the President of Catholic Bishops Conference of Myanmar His Excellency Bishop Felix Lian Khen Thang and the President of Episcopal Seminary Commission, His Eminence Charles Cardinal Bo, is attached in this proposal letter.

Our vision of this program is that the laity gain religious education in a systematic manner and become effective ministers in the Church because “the Church can never be without the lay apostolate” (Vatican II, Decree on the Apostolate of Lay People, n.1). Thus, our mission urges us to be fully committed to provide the Laity with a variety of courses on religious science that will equip them for the ministry. By gaining theological knowledge they would be well prepared and enabled to witness the Gospel values in our modern world where “present circumstances, in fact, demand from them an apostolate infinitely broader and more intense” (Vatican II, Decree on the Apostolate of Lay People, n.1).

Our Vision

We envision that lay earn religious education in a systematic manner and become effective ministers in the Church.

Our Mission

We are committed to provide lay with a variety of courses on religious science that will equip them for the ministry.

Our Values

· We are deeply committed to the fulfilment of the Great Commission of Jesus.

· We believe in equipping lay with Christ-honouring, religious education, and ministry education.

· We pursue Christ-like character in our educational endeavours.

· We encourage personal growth in professional development for lay.

Strategic Objectives

1. To promote the cause of religious studies for Laity by partnering with different commissions under the umbrella of CBCM

2. To provide a supportive learning environment that meets the learning needs of lay

3. To provide a curriculum that integrates faith and learning

4. To provide opportunities for lay to develop gifts of service and leadership in the Church

Basic Requirements for Attendants ( တက္ေရာက္မည့္သူမ်ား အတြက္ အေျခခံ လိုအပ္ခ်က္ မ်ား)

1. Certificate of Matriculation Exam or Degree from a recognized university or Certificate of Completion of Middle School (တကၠသိုလ္ ၀င္တန္း ေအာင္ျမင္ေၾကာင္း (သို ့) တကၠသိုလ္ တစ္ခုခု မွ ဘြဲ ့ရရွိ ေၾကာင္း (သို ့) အနည္းဆံုး အလည္တန္း ေအာင္ျမင္ျပီးဆံုးေျကာင္း အေထာက္အထား တစ္ခုတင္ျပရ မည္ )

2. Basic Knowledge of English (အဂၤလိပ္စာကို အေျခခံအဆင့္ သိရွိနားလည္ ထားသူ ျဖစ္ရမည္ )

3. Recommendation letter from Parish Priest or Superior Concerned ( တကၠသိုလ္ ေက်ာင္းထိုင္ ဘုန္းေတာ္ ျကီး သို ့မဟုတ္ ဂိုဏ္း အျကီး အကဲ ၏ ေထာက္ခံစာ တင္ ျပရမည္ )

4. Completed application form with two passport size photos ( ျဖည့္စြက္ထားသည့္ ၀င္ခြင့္ေလွ်ာက္လွ ြာ ပံုစံကို ပတ္စ္ပို ့ ဆိုဒ္ ဓာတ္ပံု ႏွစ္ပံု ႏွင့္ တင္ျပရ မည္ )