What does it mean to be a missionary? I’ve been contemplating that this past month, as our Australia Province has celebrated a series of first vows, temporary vow renewals and final vows.

While these celebrations of vows have been wonderful affirmations of God alive and at work in our young people, to be missionary is not just the task of the ordained or the religiously vowed.

The rural atmosphere and a warm welcome from the local community has ensured that Fr Francois Andrianihantana SVD is feeling right at home in his first missionary assignment in Emerald, Queensland.

Fr Francois, who was born and raised in Madagascar, was ordained to the priesthood in Melbourne on November 27 and arrived in Emerald Parish in January this year.

The Syro-Malabar community in Alice Springs is set to receive a new chaplain, in Divine Word Missionary priest, Fr Joe Jacob SVD.

Fr Joe, who is from Kerala in India, was ordained in 2020 and his first missionary assignment is to the Australia Province of the SVD.

In my ministry, I have had a few families talk to me about their challenges, mostly with their children. Most often some parents come to me distraught and needing answers. Do I pretend to have the answers to their questions and challenges? No! However, being a priest I often try to let them understand their problems with their children from the biblical perspective, writes Fr Clement Baffoe SVD.

In this reflection, I would like to use two biblical illustrations that perhaps might help you as well think of your own family problems broadly? Do I intend to answer your questions? No! However, if at the end of this reflection you find some meaning or comfort, we will together raise our hands and say: thanks be to God.

As the remote Aboriginal community of Santa Teresa in Central Australia grapples with its first COVID-19 outbreak, forcing many families into isolation, the parish is reaching out to support the people with online prayer and other pastoral care.

More than 150 people from a population of just 500 are currently isolating, either because they are infected by COVID or have been classed as close contacts.

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.

SVD student Shehan Fernando has become the first person from Sri Lanka to become a Divine Word Missionary, after taking his first vows in Melbourne on Sunday.

Shehan took his vows at Dorish Maru College (DMC), in the presence of his formators and fellow students, while friends and family at home in Sri Lanka watched online.

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”.