About O Clarim

O Clarim

O Clarim (Jornal O Clarim; Chinese: 號角報; pinyin: Hàojiǎobào) is a weekly newspaper published in Macau. It is owned by the Catholic Diocese of Macau and serves as the Diocese's primary communication organ. Founded in 1948, it is the oldest continuous Portuguese newspaper in Macau, holding registration number 1 with the Macau Government Information Bureau (GCS), and it is now trilingual, publishing in Portuguese, Chinese and English. Its head office is in the Sé parish of Macau, at Rua Formosa No. 5, Centro Diocesano, 8th floor. In a city whose daily press is dominated by Chinese-language titles, O Clarim occupies a singular position: a church-owned weekly that has carried the voice of Macau's Catholic community — and with it much of the city's Portuguese-language public life — for more than seven decades, from the late Portuguese colonial period through the 1999 handover to the present day.

Foundation and diocesan ownership

O Clarim was founded in 1948, when print and newspapers were the dominant media force in Macau. The Diocese of Macau that owns it is far older: the diocese was founded in 1576, the first Catholic Church jurisdiction in the Far East, and it preserved the community that the newspaper would serve through the centuries of the Portuguese presence in Macau, which lasted from 1557 to 1999. The newspaper's name, O Clarim, is Portuguese for "the bugle" or "the clarion" — an instrument sounded to call people together — in keeping with its function as the communication organ of the Diocese, announcing the life of the Church to Macau's predominantly Catholic Macanese community and to the wider city. Its Chinese name, 號角報, carries the same meaning of a sounded horn. As the GCS registration number 1 indicates, the paper stands at the head of Macau's official register of periodicals; as of 2025 the GCS had 109 periodicals with valid registration, and O Clarim remains the oldest continuously published Portuguese title among them.

A weekly in three languages

O Clarim is a weekly newspaper, published on Fridays; Macao Public Library listings for 2025 record its cycle as weekly, each Friday, and the paper describes itself as the Macau Catholic Weekly. Its most distinctive development has been linguistic. It began as a Portuguese newspaper, serving the Portuguese-speaking Catholic community of the colonial city. A Chinese-language edition was added first, reflecting the demographic reality of a city whose population is overwhelmingly Chinese-speaking, and an English-language supplement came later. The International Institute of Macau, in awarding the paper its 2026 Prémio Identidade, described exactly this evolution — a Chinese edition first and an English supplement later — as reflecting the multicultural nature of the local Catholic community and the demographic changes Macau has undergone in recent decades. The result is a single weekly appearing in Portuguese, Chinese and English editions: the paper's surviving print artefacts include a June 2014 issue whose masthead records Year 67, No. 8, dated Friday 6 June 2014, directed by the Rev. José Mario O. Mandía, priced at MOP/HKD 5.00 if sold separately, and printed by Tipografia Welfare Ltd, with the paper then based at Edf. Ngan Fai, No. 151 in Macau and reachable at telephone 28573860 — contact numbers the paper still lists today.

The newspaper and the Macau Church

As the primary communication organ of the Diocese, O Clarim publicises the actions of religious congregations and the activities in support of the community developed by the Catholic Church, and it fosters cohesion around the Diocese's values. Its pages follow the institutional life of Macau Catholicism: diocesan celebrations and anniversaries, Catholic schools and universities such as the University of Saint Joseph, Caritas charity work, parish feasts including the novena of Our Lady of Fatima, and the journeys of Macau pilgrims to events such as World Youth Day. When the Diocese opened its historic archives — close to a million documents — to the public for the first time in 2022, it was O Clarim that reported the opening on 7 October of that year, a fitting role for the Church's own newspaper of record. The paper also looks outward: in July 2018 it published, in English with a shorter Portuguese version, an interview with the editor-in-chief of Bitter Winter, a publication about religious freedom in China, introducing that magazine to Catholics in Macau and Hong Kong.

Crisis in the 1960s

The paper's history has not been free of political danger. A report compiled by the Council of Catholic Schools of Macao documented the conflict between the Macau Church and local communist organisations in 1966 to 1968, when the spillover of China's Cultural Revolution reached Macau. The Bishop of Macau, Dom Paulo José Tavares, resisted pressure to concede to the campaign against the Church and issued a public "Clarification" in September 1967 defending the Church's rights — and the episode led to the suspension of the Catholic newspaper O Clarim. The suspension is a measure of the paper's perceived importance: in a small city under political pressure, silencing the Diocese's newspaper was one of the points on which the confrontation turned. The paper resumed and continued publishing, and its survival through that period forms part of the "perseverance" its later anniversaries celebrate.

Editors and production

A weekly produced in three languages depends on a multilingual editorial team, and the paper's own anniversary coverage names some of the people who have built it. José Miguel Encarnação, editor of the Portuguese edition, is credited by the paper with transforming O Clarim into an engaging and relevant platform carrying forward the mission of the Church. Fr Leonard Dollentas has written for the paper about the work of its Chinese edition, profiling the editor who puts the Chinese edition together, and contributed its anniversary journalism. The paper's present director, named in its 2024 anniversary coverage, is Fr Eduardo Emilio Aguero, SCJ. Earlier mastheads record directors drawn from the clergy, as with the Rev. José Mario O. Mandía in 2014. The paper's current contact address is Rua Formosa No. 5, Centro Diocesano, 8/F, Macau, with telephone +853 2857 3860 and fax +853 2830 7867 — the telephone number continuous with the number printed on its mastheads a decade earlier.

The 75th anniversary and the commemorative stamp

In 2024 O Clarim celebrated its 75th anniversary, counting from a founding in the late 1940s, and the Macau Post and Telecommunications Bureau marked the milestone with a commemorative stamp issue. The Bureau held a press conference on 19 April 2024 ahead of the official issue of the stamp on 23 April 2024. The issue, designed by Victor Hugo Marreiros, comprised a set of two stamps and one souvenir sheet: the themes of the two stamps are "Newspaper Reading" and "Street Interview", while the souvenir sheet depicts Macau in the past in the background, to highlight the 75 years of history of O Clarim, and its stamp features an antique printing press and a reader reading the first edition of the newspaper. Representing the paper at the press conference were Jasmine Yiu, José Miguel Encarnação, Oswald Pio Vas and Fr Leonard Dollentas, and the paper's director, Fr Eduardo Emilio Aguero, thanked the Bureau for allowing the story and mission of O Clarim to be presented in that unique way. The paper described the stamp as a historical artefact preserving its legacy — an inspiration, it said, showcasing what dedication, innovation and commitment to the Catholic mission can achieve.

The 2026 Prémio Identidade

In 2026 the International Institute of Macau (IIM) announced that it would bestow the 2026 Prémio Identidade — the Identity Prize — on O Clarim. The prize, awarded by the IIM since 2003, recognises individuals or institutions whose work, actions and example have contributed significantly to strengthening, preserving and enhancing Macau's identity. In its citation the Institute called O Clarim, founded in 1948, the oldest Portuguese newspaper still being published in Macau, and said that over more than seven decades the publication has played a key role in affirming the singularity of the Macanese community, which is predominantly Catholic. It noted the paper's service as the primary communication organ of the Diocese and its particular significance at a moment when the Diocese celebrates its 450th anniversary — the diocese having been founded in 1576. The award places the newspaper formally among the institutions held to embody Macau's distinctive identity: Portuguese in language and heritage, Chinese in its setting and much of its readership, and Catholic in its ownership and mission.

O Clarim in Macau's media landscape

Macau's print media are registered and listed by the Government Information Bureau, which is responsible for registering newspapers, publishers and periodicals under Article 15 of the Press Law. The GCS lists thirteen Chinese daily newspapers publishing regularly in Macau, three Portuguese dailies, and the English dailies, alongside a wide range of weeklies; among the weeklies it groups O Clarim and Macau Platform as publishing bilingually in Chinese and Portuguese, while the paper itself now publishes in three languages. Macao Public Library receives the weekly across its branch libraries — thirteen copies in the 2025 listing, among the widest distributions of any Macau periodical in the public library system. In global surveys of Macau media, O Clarim is consistently singled out in the same terms: the Portuguese-English-Chinese language weekly owned by the Catholic Church, the oldest continuous Portuguese newspaper in Macau, GCS registration no. 1. The paper also publishes digitally through its website, oclarim.com.mo, in Portuguese, English and Chinese — a transition its own writers have reflected on, noting that the paper was established when print was the dominant media force in Macau, in a landscape that has since moved to real-time digital platforms.

Legacy and continuing publication

O Clarim is one of the few newspapers in this directory that has published continuously across the entire modern history of its city: founded under Portuguese administration in 1948, suspended once under political pressure in the 1960s, carried through the 1999 return of Macau to China, and still appearing every Friday as the voice of a diocese founded in 1576. Its record — oldest continuous Portuguese newspaper in Macau, first registration in the official register, a 75th anniversary marked by a state stamp issue, and the 2026 Prémio Identidade for its contribution to Macau's identity — rests on a simple continuity of mission: to serve as the communication organ of the Catholic Diocese of Macau and as a record of the Macanese community in its three languages. Its official website is oclarim.com.mo.