Dear Friends,

The Australian Indigenous celebration of NAIDOC Week this year was especially meaningful to me because of its theme, which was: “Our Languages Matter”. Perhaps it struck an extra chord with me because of our SVD parish of Our Lady of the Sacred Heart in Alice Springs being involved with the launch of the Arrernte Language Short Bible during NAIDOC Week, which, after 30 years in translation, was a wonderful achievement.

But further than that, it spoke to a truth that we, as Divine Word Missionaries give great priority to, and that is, that all languages certainly do matter to those people who speak them and they should matter to all who wish to engage with people of another culture.

I found myself meditating on the theme throughout NAIDOC Week and realising how central languages are to our life as SVD missionaries. Every SVD missionary, when he receives an assignment to a new country, far from home, spends the first year of that assignment intensively learning the local language. He not only learns the language, but the culture as well. However, language is the first port of call, because it is language that can help unlock the culture.

St Joseph Freinademetz SVD, who was one of the first two Divine Word Missionaries sent to a foreign country, set the standard for this, when he immersed himself in the Chinese language and culture. A German, he found it difficult, to say the least, but he persisted, because he knew that to touch hearts, you have to be able to speak the language of the person who’s heart you wish to touch. Eventually, he was so proficient that he was able to produce a catechetical manual in Chinese and, despite all the hardship he had gone through in the early days of his mission, he wrote to his family: “I love China and the Chinese. I want to die among them and be laid to rest among them.” He also knew however, the value of that other great universal language, saying: “The language that all people understand is the language of love”.

So, as the NAIDOC Week theme reminds us, languages do indeed matter. Sadly, indigenous languages are dying out across the world at an alarming rate. As SVDs we try to address this in our own small way by committing to learning the language of wherever it is that we live and work. In Central Australia, any new SVD missionary who arrives to work there undertakes lessons in the Arrernte language. It is a particularly challenging language to learn and our confreres make slow progress with it, but we remain committed to continuing the journey because for the local Aborigines, their language, which developed over many thousands of years, matters. May it, and other indigenous languages around the country and the world, continue to matter to us all.

Yours in the Word,

Fr Henry Adler SVD

Provincial