The SVD recently led a Youth Retreat in the northern part of Fiji aimed at helping tackle the growing problem of cannabis use among young people, while also calling them to action on the issue of climate change.

The retreat was facilitated by SVD AUS Provincial, Fr Asaeli Rass, who was in Fiji on home-leave.

As I write this message, we have just received news that Russia has begun attacking its neighbour, Ukraine with military force.

We, in the SVD AUS Province, pray for the people of Ukraine and the whole world as a period of great instability stretches before us and we join in Pope Francis’ call for a day of prayer and fasting for Ukraine on Ash Wednesday, March 2.

Australia has gained its first Divine Word Missionary bishop with the episcopal ordination of Bishop Tim Norton SVD as Auxiliary Bishop of Brisbane.

Bishop Tim was ordained at St Stephen’s Cathedral on February 22 by Archbishop Mark Coleridge, who said the appointment of an SVD bishop was in some ways unexpected, but timely, because the Church needed to be more missionary.

On January 19, 1909, four days after the death of St Arnold Janssen, his successor, Fr Nicholas Blum, wrote a letter to all the congregations founded by St Arnold with this request: to keep Arnold Janssen’s memory alive, to continue and expand his work in his spirit, reflected SVD Superior-General, Fr Budi Kleden SVD in a YouTube message on St Arnold's feast day recently.

His life-force, his spirit, is well-formulated in the prayer he passed on to us as his legacy: “May the holy triune God live in our hearts and in the hearts of all people”.

COVID lockdowns and restrictions have not stopped the Spanish chaplaincy community in Auckland from getting together for spiritual support and fellowship, but rather challenged them to find new ways of gathering.

Chaplain to the Spanish community, Fr Alejandro de la Sotta says the pandemic restrictions in New Zealand have resulted in the birth of a new YouTube ministry for the community.

The SVD Australia Province has launched a special appeal to raise funds for relief and rehabilitation activities for people hit by Typhoon Rai in the southern Philippines in December.

The Provincial appeal supports a worldwide fundraising effort by the Divine Word Missionaries to assist those in the Philippines who lost lives, homes and livelihoods when the typhoon caused widespread devastation.

As many Australians enjoyed a holiday break, two Divine Word Missionary students from Dorish Maru College have spent their summer in Melbourne’s hospitals, completing their Clinical Pastoral Experience.

Neftali Velasco Fabian SVD from Mexico and Cuong Quoc Dang SVD from Vietnam, who are training to be missionary priests, have been learning how to support patients in hospital – all during one of the most challenging periods for our healthcare system, due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Divine Word Missionary communities throughout the AUS Province and the world have had much to celebrate in January, with the commemoration of two SVD saints – St Arnold Janssen and St Joseph Freinademetz.

St Arnold’s feast day was on January 15, the date of his death in 1909 in Steyl, Holland. He was the founder of the Divine Word Missionaries, as well as two orders of Religious Women, the Servant Sisters of the Holy Spirit and the Servants of the Holy Spirit of Perpetual Adoration.

Welcome to our first edition of ‘In the Word’ for 2022 and the second edition of the new and refreshed design of our e-newsletter. We hope you like it!

The re-design extends right across our digital communications, including our website and our Society Matters mission magazine. It signifies the importance we place on communications as one of the key pillars of our mission.

The account in Luke’s gospel of Mary going to visit her cousin Elizabeth tells us that Our Lady “arose and went with haste” to share the joy she carried in her heart and in her womb, reflected Pope Francis in last Sunday’s Angelus address.

“She arose and went. In the last stretch of the journey of Advent, let us be guided by these two verbs. To arise and to go in haste: these are the two movements that Mary made and that she invites us also to make as Christmas approaches.”