Christ the King seminary
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Pakistan's national seminary located in Karachi is dedicated to Christ the King. The current rector is Father Augustine Soares who is an alumnus of the seminary, as is the present Archbishop of Karachi Evarist Pinto.
The high-water mark of the seminary's 50 year existence was the recruitment of 98 seminarians for the class that entered in 1990.
When the seminary started in 1956 it had only four students. Among them was Archbishop Lawrence Saldanha of Lahore, who later went on to become its Rector. Other alumni include Bishop Anthony Theodore Lobo of Islamabad-Rawalpindi, Bishop Joseph Coutts of Faisalabad, Bishop Max John Rodrigues of Hyderabad, Bishop Andrew Francis of Multan, and the late Bishops John Joseph of Faisalabad and Patras Yusaf of Multan.
Fifty years on, the seminary has graduated 780 students from Pakistan and abroad, some coming from Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, Italy, the Netherlands and Sri Lanka.
It also expanded over the decades, adding a grassy field for soccer and cricket, a basketball court, a pavilion, a retreat center and a Marian grotto with a fountain. The National Catholic Institute of Theology (NCIT) was established at the seminary in September 1997, offering academic courses leading to a diploma in theology, as well as programs for laypeople and Religious involved in Church ministries.
In 1994 the philosophy studies program for seminarians was separated from the theology program and moved to the Lahore archdiocese.
In addition to dwindling vocations, the seminary has had to deal with a shortage of drinking water over the last 10 years, exacerbated by local authorities appropriation, without compensation, of its old well in November 2005 for the Lyari Expressway project.
The expressway project is part of Karachi's "Cleaning the City" drive, which the Asian Human Rights Commission says has rendered thousands homeless. It adds that 11,000 houses and 3,100 commercial buildings outside the path of the expressway have been evacuated and demolished.
