Next week, from August 7-14, the Church in Australia will celebrate National Vocations Awareness Week, a time to shine a spotlight on how we choose to respond to God’s call in our life.

We all have a vocation – that is a path to knowing, loving and serving God in our life. Whether it be marriage or single life or a vocation to priestly or religious life, each vocation, given to us by God, is precious and to be valued.

Fr Paulo Vatunitu SVD says God’s hand has guided him all the way in his life, from a career in banking to a vocation as a missionary priest, and he’s confident God will be with be with him now as he takes up a new assignment at Daly River in the remote Northern Territory.

Paulo was born and raised in Fiji, on the island of Vanua Levu and is the second eldest of eight children. After school, he made a career as a loans officer in the banking industry.

The Catholic Church in Australia is about to celebrate Vocations Awareness Week from August 7–14. It’s a time to stop and listen in awe to the way God has worked in people’s lives and called them to walk different paths in service to God and others.

In the AUS Province we are blessed to once again have a ‘full house’ at our formation house, Dorish Maru College in Box Hill, Melbourne. The pandemic-related international border closures meant that for the past two years, the young men who had been due to start their theological studies here could not gain entry to Australia. It is a delight to now be welcoming them into our Provincial community.

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.

Today as we celebrate the Good Shepherd Sunday, we are called to reflect on Jesus as our Good Shepherd. He knows us and we are called to follow him.

Who is Jesus Christ? This has been an age-old question that many people particularly theologians have tried to answer.

It’s a long way from Fr Prakash Menezes SVD’s home in India to his parish of Santa Teresa in the Central Australian desert country, but it is exactly the kind of Christ-led and people-centred life he hoped for when he signed up to be a missionary priest.

Fr Prakash joined the Divine Word Missionaries in India and undertook his theological studies and formation in Melbourne, where he made his final vows and was ordained to the priesthood in 2014.

The fourth Sunday of Easter has been traditionally celebrated as the Good Shepherd Sunday and is set apart to pray for vocations.

Born in a small town in Madagascar, Marius Razafimandimby could not have imagined in his childhood that he would one day be living in Australia and completing his final studies towards becoming a Divine Word Missionaries (SVD) priest.Born in a small town in Madagascar, Marius Razafimandimby could not have imagined in his childhood that he would one day be living in Australia and completing his final studies towards becoming a Divine Word Missionaries (SVD) priest.

But, he says that coming across the world to complete his formation at the SVD formation house, Dorish Maru College in Melbourne has broadened his horizons.
“Missionary life is a widening of everyone’s horizon,” he says.

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.