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RELIGION
In 1848, following close in the footprints of the Priests, the Sisters of the St Paul de Chartres arrived in Hong Kong. At the corner of what is now Gresson Street in Wan Chai they opened a convent with the first Catholic school for girls and a hospital, forerunner of their comprehensive institution in Causeway Bay.
Msgr Aloysius Ambrosi, Prefect Apostolic in 1855, was a pioneer in what is now called juvenile care. Prominent among his diverse works was the founding of the 'West Point Reforma- tory for Boys'. Despite a forbidding name, it was a highly successful institution. Conducted on principles of sympathy and understanding, it provided a practical training programme. An- other outstanding institution founded by Msgr Ambrosi was St Saviour's College, the first Catholic Secondary School, which had developed into a flourishing institution when the La Salle Brothers took it over 15 years later.
Then in 1860 the Canossian Sisters arrived and began their great work for the education of girls and in the care of the sick, of which they celebrated their centenary during the last year.
In 1867 the Holy See entrusted the Prefecture Apostolic of Hong Kong to the Pontifical Foreign Mission Institute, whose first missionaries had arrived in the Colony in 1858, and seven years later Pope Pius IX raised the status of the Prefecture Apostolic to that of a Vicariate. Msgr Timoleon Raimondi, until then Prefect, was consecrated a bishop and appointed the first Vicar Apostolic of Hong Kong.
There were 3 Roman Catholic churches when Bishop Raimondi took charge: the Cathedral in Wellington Street, the Church of St Francis Xavier in Wan Chai and Rosary Church in Kowloon. He added St Joseph's Church in Garden Road and extended the work of the Church in the New Territories and in South China proper as far as Waichow. In 1877 he established the first Catholic newspaper and in 1888 built the present Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception in Caine Road. Bishop Raimondi died in 1894.
Early in the 20th century, following the Boxer Rising and the rise in Hong Kong's population, institutions were built in all parts of the Colony under the care of new religious orders and con- gregations. Ricci Hall, the Catholic Hostel at the University of