I have to admit that for quite some time I have not read many SVD publications. I feel I don’t find anything new. The familiar messages of multi/intercultural, international, dialogue(s), mission, ‘world is our parish’, ‘unity in diversity’… all sound too familiar from the novitiate days and almost slogan-like. It’s the same message, just under different packaging. Social justice and climate change! Oh yeah, great! Who would not stand up for such lofty ideas in this age of the globalisation, unless one is a bigot.

Like doubting Thomas, instead of taking ideas for granted, we must keep asking questions and re-examine what is passed on to us. Renew and revive!

The seminarians in the Divine Word Missionaries’ Australia Province have been hitting the road recently to spend time getting to know some of the youth in SVD parishes in Queensland and sharing their vocation stories with them.

The road-trip from Melbourne’s Dorish Maru College to the parishes of St Maximilian Kolbe in Marsden and St Mark’s, Inala, is part of the mission outreach of SVD Youth, which was established in the Province earlier this year.

SVD student, Shehan Fernando, says his pastoral experience in Central Australia has been a great learning experience in his training for life as a missionary, as he encounters Christ in the people and the land.

Shehan, who is Sri Lankan, and has been undertaking studies and formation at Melbourne’s Dorish Maru College, arrived in Santa Teresa in March, and will be based there until September when he moves on to Alice Springs.

More than 20 years ago, the SVD established its presence in Thailand by creating the Mother of Perpetual Help Centre to assist people with HIV-AIDS. Today, the Centre is still providing its much-needed care, along with a range of outreach services to help poor families and school students, while also educating the local community about HIV spread and prevention.

On top of that, SVD confreres are serving the poor and marginalised in rural parish ministry, supporting Vietnamese migrants in Bangkok in a series of ministries described by the Provincial, Fr Asaeli Rass SVD, on a recent visitation as “truly missionary and truly inspiring”.

SVD student Shehan Fernando has become the first person from Sri Lanka to become a Divine Word Missionary, after taking his first vows in Melbourne on Sunday.

Shehan took his vows at Dorish Maru College (DMC), in the presence of his formators and fellow students, while friends and family at home in Sri Lanka watched online.

Australia has gained its first Divine Word Missionary bishop with the episcopal ordination of Bishop Tim Norton SVD as Auxiliary Bishop of Brisbane.

Bishop Tim was ordained at St Stephen’s Cathedral on February 22 by Archbishop Mark Coleridge, who said the appointment of an SVD bishop was in some ways unexpected, but timely, because the Church needed to be more missionary.

On January 19, 1909, four days after the death of St Arnold Janssen, his successor, Fr Nicholas Blum, wrote a letter to all the congregations founded by St Arnold with this request: to keep Arnold Janssen’s memory alive, to continue and expand his work in his spirit, reflected SVD Superior-General, Fr Budi Kleden SVD in a YouTube message on St Arnold's feast day recently.

His life-force, his spirit, is well-formulated in the prayer he passed on to us as his legacy: “May the holy triune God live in our hearts and in the hearts of all people”.

The SVD Australia Province has launched a special appeal to raise funds for relief and rehabilitation activities for people hit by Typhoon Rai in the southern Philippines in December.

The Provincial appeal supports a worldwide fundraising effort by the Divine Word Missionaries to assist those in the Philippines who lost lives, homes and livelihoods when the typhoon caused widespread devastation.

Divine Word Missionary communities throughout the AUS Province and the world have had much to celebrate in January, with the commemoration of two SVD saints – St Arnold Janssen and St Joseph Freinademetz.

St Arnold’s feast day was on January 15, the date of his death in 1909 in Steyl, Holland. He was the founder of the Divine Word Missionaries, as well as two orders of Religious Women, the Servant Sisters of the Holy Spirit and the Servants of the Holy Spirit of Perpetual Adoration.