Father John has invited me to speak in honour of St. Arnold Janssen, the founder of three missionary religious congregations: the Divine Word Missionaries, the Holy Spirit Missionary Sisters, and the Holy Spirit Sisters of Perpetual Eucharistic Adoration.

We simply speak of him as Father Arnold. His feast day was last Friday.

There was an ache in his heart for the people in the far flung countries of the world who had never heard of Christ. The Church in Germany had no national outreach to any of these people; and even though there was a persecution of the Church at that time in Germany, he wanted to do something. . . . and he did.

He founded the Society of the Divine Word in 1875, and the other two congregations followed some few years later when he was more sure of his calling and the nature of his great enterprise.

First of all, I want to emphasise the faith of his parents and of the faith community that nurtured him. There is always a context to history.

For example, as a conclusion to the evening family rosary, Father Arnold’s father, Gerhard, would read as a blessing on the family the prologue of John‘s Gospel, “In the beginning was the Word”.

The title of his first missionary congregation was called “The Society of the Divine Word”. I remember as a sixteen year old candidate being introduced to that Prologue of John right at the beginning of my training.

Arnold’s mother, Anna Katharine, a great lover of prayer, had a special devotion to the Holy Spirit, and one aspect of that devotion found expression in her attending Mass every third Monday. The two feminine congregations Father Arnold founded bear the name of the Holy Spirit.

I just mention these points to highlight the power that family faith can exercise in the life of its children.

Moving on to the missionary vocation itself, let me highlight what Father Arnold has bequeathed to us and called forth from succeeding generations.

The first point I want to make is to highlight the magnanimity of the missionary spirit: the big-heartedness, the graciousness, the outreach to the distant, to the other who is different, that is at the heart of the missionary calling, and I want to involve the family setting in this. Truly this calling is something to be prized but like all big-heartedness there is a price to be paid.

*****

I remember the farewell party given me when I was leaving to continue my studies in the United States back in 1951. There. That night, I gave my first public speech, and after the guests had all left I remember my mother chasing my father through the house. He was overcome with grief. I was leaving for a space of seven years that turned out to be nine before I came back.

The next morning I was sitting in the kitchen having a cup of tea while my mother prepared lunch and talked with my father about my leaving. I sat and listened to them speaking to one another. She said, “God gives the children to us and then he takes them from us.”

Even as a youth without experience, I thought, “Mum, how can you say that with such detachment”?

My father took some time to reply. Then he said, “Yeah! But it hurts.” My brother John had just been ordained in Rome and here was the second son going off to the States.

I think of the story of one of our newly ordained priests, an Indian confrere, Fr. Prakash. He finished the final four or five years of his training at our college in Melbourne. Soon after he entered the seminary in India, his superiors asked him to return home to discuss his calling with his parents for he was an only child. Could the family make such a sacrifice – no grand-children!? He returned home and his parents let him go back to the seminary.

At his ordination in 2014, after the bishop had addressed the three deacons to be ordained, he indicated that the three deacons (one from Vietnam, one from Indonesia, and Prakash from India) would speak to their families before the ceremony continued. When Prakash came to the microphone, he broke down and couldn’t find a word. Bishop Hurley, ordaining prelate from the Northern Territory, got up walked over to Prakash and put his arm around him and stood with him until he could to continue. Prakash’s parents were there plus his godmother. It was a very moving experience for all present.

Father Prakash is now stationed in Alice Springs, a long way away from his home and his parents. The big-heartedness of the missionary calling is nurtured and shared in by the faith community.

*****

I spoke of a cost to bigheartedness.

In the Pacific War in Papua New Guinea alone, Fifty-five Holy Spirit Sisters were killed: on the Japanese ship, the Akikase, 18 Holy Spirit Sisters and 22 SVDs, Brothers and priests, and one bishop, were shot. They were forced to walk the plank, shot and allowed to drop off into the ocean.

As prisoners on the Japanese ship, Yorishime Maru, forty-one SVD Brothers and priests, including one bishops, died after being strafed by an American fighter plane. Thirty-seven Holy Spirit Sisters were also killed in the same attack. It was a huge loss and tragedy. They were crowded helplessly and un-protected on the deck.
Of the first one hundred SVDs to die in the missions of PNG their age averaged 38.

*****

Each of the three congregations are well beyond the one hundred year mark. Think of the spirit that has animated the thousands of SVDs and Holy Spirit Sisters throughout those years - in faraway difficult places. Think of the Holy Spirit Sisters cloistered in their convents and praying before the Blessed Sacrament day-in and day-out for the work of the missions for over a hundred years.

It is a special missionary grace to love and serve another people and to be loved in turn by the same people.

As a member of the Society of the Divine Word founded by Father Arnold, I am deeply grateful for the courageous, creative and magnanimous spirit that possessed him to reach out as he did given the extreme difficulties of his time. The Church was being persecuted in Germany. Father Arnold simply crossed the Maas river into Holland and started there.

Some of his contemporaries thought he was either a fool or a saint; quite a number of the local clergy and religious did not attend the opening ceremony for his first seminary on 8th September 1875. They thought it couldn’t last. It was just a wild dream.

His spirit was nurtured first by his own family and faith community, then supported by the foundational generation, the first men and women who were touched and moved by the same spirit.

May I simply end with a prayer that has come down us from Father Arnold:
“May the darkness of sin and the night of unbelief vanish before the light of the Word and the Spirit of Grace, and may the Heart of Jesus live in the hearts of all people. Amen.“

Frank Gerry SVD