Fr. Michael Richartz, SVD, PhD
(1893-1982)

(The new Richartz Center at Talamban Campus was named after the late Fr. Michael Richartz, SVD, who was assigned at the University of San Carlos in the 1950s.)

           
As a leading higher education institute in the southern Philippines, the early prominence of the University of San Carlos was due to an irony of fate:  the Socialist Revolution in China led by Mao Zedong in 1948.  The upheaval that ensued put an end to the work of the Divine Word Missionaries at Fu Jen University in Peking (Beijing).  Among the exiled missionary scholars was Fr. Michael Richartz, a professor of natural sciences with a specialization in optics, who established at Fu Jen an optical laboratory and, among other things, developed a “quarter wave compensator” that is described in a well-known handbook of practical physics published later in 1954.

With the imprisonment of the University Rector Fr. Harold Rigney in 1950, Father Richartz took over the post, only to be imprisoned himself when the Communists sequestered the properties of the University. After lengthy negotiation by both the German and American governments, he was released and returned to Germany in 1951.

Assigned to the Philippines in 1952, Father Richartz assumed the chairmanship of the Department of Physics, University of San Carlos, where he had, now at the height of his academic career, the opportunity to devote time to further his scientific work. Already a recognized authority in optics at Fu Jen University, he continued to publish in scientific periodicals, specifically in The Physics Teacher and, elucidating an experimental method of polarization and ellipsometry, the prestigious Journal of the Optical Society of America.  To the University’s San Carlos Publications, he contributed monographs on Remarks on Polarimetric Instruments (1964), Experimental Methods in Ellipsometry (1966) and Interferometry: Principles and Instruments (1968).

While not the youngest missionary scholar leaving Communist China, his years allowed him to have experienced in person the founder of the Society of the Divine Word, Saint Arnold Janssen. Born in the small town of Sechtem near Bonn in the Archdiocese of Cologne, Germany, in 1893, Father Richartz entered the Society at St. Michael’s Mission Haus, Steyl, Holland in 1906.  After completing his secondary education in 1913, he entered the novitiate at St. Gabriel Seminary in Mödling near Vienna, Austria, where he later took up philosophical and theological studies, pronouncing his first vows in 1914.  Recruited in the German army at the outbreak of World War I, he sustained a head injury, finally becoming a prisoner of war in France until 1920.  Completing his theological studies at St. Gabriel’s, he took perpetual vows in 1921 and was ordained a priest on May 21, 1922.

During his tenure as teacher at St. Michael’s Seminary in Steyl from 1922 to 1936, he completed his academic training earning the degree Doctor Rerum Naturalium (Doctorate in Natural Sciences in Physics) from the University of Münster.  These studies effectively launched his long career of missionary scholarly endeavor, initially at Fu Jen University in Peking and then at the University of San Carlos, Cebu City, Philippines.  Here, simultaneously with his commitments at the University, he played a significant role in the re-establishment of the Fu Jen Catholic University now in Taipei, Taiwan.  

At the age of 80, Father Richartz returned to Germany where he served as chaplain in a home for the elderly near St. Augustin Seminary, Seigburg, Cologne.  The last years of his life were spent in retirement in southern Germany where he died peacefully on March 21, 1982.  Laid to rest in the Society’s cemetery near St. Johann Mission House in Bloenrid-Aulendorf, he ended an eventful but eminently fruitful missionary scholar’s life.