In Australia and New Zealand, we are  familiar with the presence of people on TV using sign language. When an important announcement is made, the speaker is accompanied by an interpreter who uses sign language to speak to the deaf audience.

For us who are living here in Australia, royalty is not far from our national consciousness. There’s hardly a week that we don’t have news about Queen Elizabeth and the royal family.

We are coming to the end of the Liturgical Year and the readings of this Sunday speak to us of the end of the world, the end of time, the final coming of Jesus to take all peoples and all creation to himself.

I am delighted that Fr Tim Norton SVD, a member of the SVD Australia Province, has been appointed by Pope Francis to be Auxiliary Bishop of Brisbane.

Tim will be an exciting and extremely capable bishop. As a missionary and a former Provincial, he will bring to this ministry a wealth of experience in Church leadership both at the universal and local level.

Pope Francis has this evening announced that Society of the Divine Word priest Fr Tim Norton will become an auxiliary bishop in the Archdiocese of Brisbane.

Fr Norton, who is currently in ministry in Italy, will early next year join Auxiliary Bishop Ken Howell in supporting Archbishop Mark Coleridge in serving the Catholics of Brisbane Archdiocese.

The readings this Sunday talk about the need for generosity of heart. The two widows represented in today’s first reading and the Gospel are the unlikely people who could be generous.

Recently I was reading the book “Seeking Spirituality” by Ronald Rolheiser, reflects Fr James Aricheera SVD. I found this book to be a good guide for those who are seeking spirituality. According to him, three main things hinder one from interiority and spiritual experiences. They are “Narcissism, pragmatism and unbridled restlessness”.

To get a general understanding of them he writes, “Defined simply, narcissism means excessive self-preoccupation; pragmatism means excessive focus on work, achievement, and the practical concerns for life; and restlessness means an excessive greed for experience, an over-eating, not in terms of food but in terms trying to drink in too much of life”. When I reflected further on this, I realised that many of us have those things in us, but we are not aware of it.

As world leaders prepare to gather for the COP26 United Nations climate summit in Glasgow, the Divine Word Missionaries are undertaking a series of local and global initiatives to help play their part in tackling the climate crisis.

SVD communities across the world are committing to Pope Francis’ Laudato Si’ Action Platform which proposes a seven-step, seven-year set of goals towards preserving and restoring God’s creation which is seen as a vehicle for all human life.

Fr Ennio Mantovani SVD, a missionary for more than 64 years, has launched a new book, bringing to life in vibrant pictures his 15 years of living with and accompanying the people of Yobai in Papua New Guinea.

The book, entitled History of Yobai in Pictures, is a companion volume to Fr Ennio’s 2019 written account of his missionary life, entitled Sixty Years of Priestly and Missionary Life.

The SVD has established a new Melbourne District in a bid to provide the best pastoral care to its growing number of missionaries engaged in a range of different ministries in Victoria.

The new District was inaugurated on the Feast of the Archangels Michael, Gabriel and Raphael, a special feast for the Universal Church and for the founder of the Divine Word Missionaries, St Arnold Janssen, who dedicated the first SVD house to the patronage of St Michael in Steyl, Holland in 1875.