SVD members who have been ordained or ministering in Australia for fewer than five years gathered in Townsville recently for a week of ongoing formation and fellowship.

The confreres, who come from all around the world, and are assigned to various parts of the country, gathered over the first week of April and said they returned to their respective parishes happy, refreshed and re-energised.

The halls of Dorish Maru College, the SVD’s formation house in Melbourne, are once again ringing with life following the arrival of five new missionary students – the first big intake since international borders re-opened after the pandemic.

The students are from Vietnam and China. Also arriving recently are two SVD priests, who are studying English before beginning their ministry.

As this edition of In the Word lands in your inbox, I am preparing to represent the Divine Word Missionaries and the communities we serve at the Fifth Plenary Council of Australia, which begins on Sunday. Fr Prakash Menezes SVD, parish priest in Alice Springs, will also be attending as part of the Darwin Diocese’s delegation, due to his role as Episcopal Vicar for the Diocese’s Central Region.

Of course, none of the members of the Plenary Council have ever taken part in something like this before, as the last Australian Plenary Council was held in 1937, so there is both excitement and some trepidation at what is to come.

SVD missionary students spread out from Dorish Maru College in Melbourne over the summer months to take up pastoral placements in different Divine Word Missionary communities around Australia.

Some enjoyed the experience of suburban parish life, while others immersed themselves in Indigenous culture in Central Australia, or joined in ministry at the Janssen Spirituality Centre in Victoria.

At 83  years of age, and recently given the all-clear by Sydney specialists after treatment for Leukaemia, Archbishop William Kurtz SVD has headed back to Papua New Guinea to continue his ministry of providing formation for catechists and “helping out” wherever he can.

Archbishop Kurtz, who retired as the Archbishop of Madang in 2010, says he could have returned home to Poland when he retired at 76, but after more than 50 years in PNG, he’d come to love the place and the people, and he wasn’t sure he could cope with the European winters.

It’s an unassuming building in suburban Melbourne, but Dorish Maru College, has been a powerhouse of missionary formation since it was established 30 years ago.

Dorish Maru College (DMC), the formation house of the Divine Word Missionaries AUS Province, opened its doors in 1988 and since that time has formed and trained hundreds of missionaries who are now serving all around the world.

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.

Two Novices for the SVD AUS Province, Cuong Quoc Peter Dang and Chalerm Naruemankanthon, have professed their first vows as Divine Word Missionaries in a ceremony in the Philippines.

The two young men, from the Thai District of the AUS Province, have been undertaking their Novitiate in the Philippines for the past year and will now continue their formation and studies in Australia.

Life as a missionary student has all kinds of challenges, but Maciej Zielinski SVD went looking for even more obstacles recently when he competed in the gruelling Spartan Race in Melbourne.

Maciej, from Poland, is in formation to be a Divine Word Missionary and is currently spending time in the AUS Province as part of the SVD Overseas Training Program.

One of the great blessings of the SVD across the world and in the AUS Province is the presence of its young members, and recently, those confreres who have been in the AUS Province for five years or less, got together for some ongoing formation.

“It was a time to come together and share our story of our ministry in our respective fields,” says one of the participants, Fr Kommareddy Rajasekhar Reddy SVD (Raja). “We were given an opportunity to share our joys and challenges in ministry.”