Way back in 1969 I came to Ledalero, the major seminary of the Divine Word Missionaries, in Flores, Indonesia. I was a seminarian, coming to study theology and preparing for priesthood. I was ordained in early 1973, and then worked for about 3 years on a small island in the Flores Sea called Palue. 

In 1976, I returned to Australia, taking-on a number of jobs in the following years in Australia, New Zealand and Tonga. Then, when my second term as parish priest of Sacred Heart Parish, Preston, in Victoria, was coming to an end, I accepted an invitation to return to Ledalero. 

The Vietnamese migrants living and working in New Caledonia are a long way from home and their faith plays a big role in keeping them together as a community in a new land.

With only one Vietnamese priest in the Pacific country, the SVD AUS Province Mission Secretary, Fr Truc Quoc Phan pays regular visits to New Caledonia to help meet the faith needs of the migrant people.

The young people of Our Lady of the Sacred Heart Parish in Alice Springs received a dynamic boost to their faith recently when Fr Rob Galea came to town for a shared experience of high energy musical praise and worship.

Fr Rob, who was born and raised in Malta, is a priest of the Diocese of Bendigo, and is well known and loved for his ministry of reaching out to young people through music and song writing. His visit to Alice Springs was part of a wider tour of the Top End, taking in Darwin and the Tiwi Islands.

More than 20 young SVD missionaries and SSpS Sisters gathered in Sydney recently for a workshop which explored different aspects of interculturality, both in the community life of a missionary and in ministry.

All of the young missionaries who attended have been in vows for 10 years or less, or are recent arrivals in the Province.

The General Visitation from the SVD leadership in Rome has found the SVD AUS Province to be young and vibrant, with hope for the future, and focused on its role serving multi-ethnic parishes, indigenous communities, intercultural living, formation, and inter-faith dialogue, according to the SVD Vice Superior General, Fr Bob Kisala.

Fr Bob has spent a month visiting all the places in Australia, Thailand and New Zealand where the Divine Word Missionaries are in ministry.

The Janssen Spirituality Centre is known for its conferences and lectures and meditation sessions by means of which we try to promote interreligious dialogue. Often this can be rather “heady” or cerebral which is not what all dialogue is about. 

So a couple of months ago at one of our planning session we decided to have a look at prayer beads as used by the “lay” people and from the various faith traditions.

The Janssen Spirituality Centre in Boronia, Victoria, looks quiet, peaceful and unprepossessing from the outside, but the Director of the Centre, Fr Nick de Groot SVD, hopes it will continue to thrive and grow as a space for interreligious hospitality, where stories are shared and hearts opened.

“I hope it will continue to be a place in which people celebrate their search for God, for meaning in life, for healing,” Fr Nick says.

Fr Don Grant SVD is to receive an honour from the Government of Papua New Guinea, in recognition of his 45 years’ service to the community as a missionary to that country.

The honour, the Order of the Star of Melanesia, is part of PNG’s own national honours and awards system known as The Orders of Papua New Guinea.

The Mission Office of the SVD AUS Province has responded to a call for help from the Divine Word Missionaries in Ecuador to help fund emergency recovery work needed in the wake of a powerful 7.8 magnitude earthquake in that country.

More than 650 people died in the earthquake, with about 16,000 injured and more than 30,000 people left homeless.

Three Divine Word Missionaries, Anthony Li, Laurensius (Laurens) Woda and Michael Wu were ordained to the priesthood last week in a joyous celebration attended by their family, friends and SVD confreres.

In receiving the gift of priesthood, the three young men were also being made into gifts for the people they will serve, said ordaining prelate, Archbishop Mark Coleridge of Brisbane.