Happy Easter to all our friends and readers of ‘In the Word’.

There’s nothing quite like Easter to renew and reinvigorate our faith. The empty tomb, the appearances of the Risen Lord, and finally, the penny dropping with Jesus’ followers, that the Scriptures have been fulfilled in Him.

For more than 1500 years the first Sunday after Easter had been known in the Liturgical Books as “Sunday in White Garments -- Dominica in Albis”.

Fr Joseph Reddy SVD is heading to Panama next month with 24 young people from the Wollongong Diocese to take part in his first World Youth Day experience.

Fr Joseph, who is assistant priest at Mary Mother of the Church Parish in Macquarie Fields, will be a chaplain to the group, which is mostly made up of teachers, aged in their 20s, from Diocese of Wollongong schools.

This month, the Church in Australia, and we in the Divine Word Missionaries, celebrated National Vocations Week.This is a week to celebrate all vocations, whether to marriage, the single life, priesthood or religious life and we often forget how intertwined all those different vocations are.

Marriage, of course, is the foundational vocation from which all others flow. It is within the loving embrace of family life and faith that the other vocations may take seed and grow. When people sometimes talk of a vocations crisis in the Church, I wonder if part of the problem isn’t really a crisis of marriage and family life. If this is the case, we must do all we can to support family life and help it flourish.

It’s not every day that you can go to the horse races and receive the sacraments while you’re there, but for the people of Queensland’s central highlands, that’s a once-a-year possibility at the Twin Hills races.

Fr Ronaldo Rodriguez SVD says it is all part of his faith outreach to people who live in remote areas and don’t always manage to make it to a church.

Maciej Zielinski is an Extreme Cross-Country runner from Poland who likes challenges in life and he’s looking forward to the experiences that will come his way during his two years in the SVD AUS Province, as part of the Overseas Training Program.

“I’ve been here for two months and I’m very happy to be here and to be working hard on my English,” 24-year-old Maciej says.

One day, I was reading my Facebook page as I always do at certain times of the day and I saw this beautiful quote, “God doesn’t say NO to our prayers. God has three answers - either he says, YES; AT A LATER TIME; or I HAVE A BETTER IDEA.

The first results from the latest Census have been released this week and they confirm that here in Australia, we are living in an increasingly diverse religious and cultural society.

The Census showed two key things that were already somewhat obvious to anybody who’s been paying attention to such things – the number of people identifying as being of ‘no religion’ has risen and the nation is becoming increasingly multicultural. What meaning can we take from this?

Fr Alejandro Jose De la Sotta Dominguez SVD is a long way from his home in Chile, but says the “incredible diversity of cultures” that he’s found at St Mark’s Parish, Inala is enriching his life, his faith and his ministry.

Fr Alejandro, who is relatively new to the AUS Province, is Acting Parish Priest at St Mark’s while Fr Stephen Pilly SVD enjoys his home leave in India.

One of the more difficult sayings of Jesus is in today’s gospel. “If you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to the mulberry tree, ‘Be uprooted’ and it would obey you.”