The SVD AUS Province is to receive a new member as soon as the pandemic allows, with Fr Tommy Lehan SVD due to take up a mission assignment in Thailand.

Fr Tommy was born in Boas, Indonesia in 1990 and raised in Atambua, the main city of the Belu district.

Born and raised on the Mekong Delta river in South Vietnam, Fr Long Nguyen SVD could have ended up a businessman, but instead he chose to become a missionary priest and he is looking forward to taking up his first assignment, in Australia.

It’s not Fr Long’s first time in Australia though. He spent a year here in 2012 as part of his training with the Divine Word Missionaries, as well as a year in Thailand, and he couldn’t wait to come back.

The Cantonese-speaking community in Melbourne has a new chaplain in Fr James Areechira SVD, who, although he is Indian, has spent 26 years of his missionary life living and working as a priest in Hong Kong.

Fr James says he first learnt Cantonese in 1988 when he took part in the SVD Overseas Training Program for two years in Hong Kong as a young missionary student.

One of the wonderful things about our SVD AUS Province is that we are blessed to have young men from all over the world completing their formation at Dorish Maru College in Melbourne.

This constant influx of youth and energy keeps us young as a Province and their energy spills over into many aspects of our lives and ministry.

Ever since I arrived to Thailand as a missionary in 2007, I have and continue to be engaged in many different ministries. One of my ongoing ministries is with undocumented Vietnamese migrant workers in this country. Being a migrant worker anywhere is quite difficult, but the undocumented status adds even more hardships to one’s life.

As expected, life as an undocumented migrant worker in Thailand has been extremely challenging during these times when the coronavirus pandemic has put a stop to the livelihood of a tremendous number of people. Most Vietnamese migrant workers in Thailand are facing a situation of joblessness, lack of income, and no way to go home because all the ways of leaving the country have been closed by the Thai government in order to fight the pandemic.

New research by SVD missionary Fr Michael Nguyen explores the question of how Vietnamese people might read and understand the famous account in John’s Gospel of Jesus multiplying the loaves in their own cultural context.

Fr Michael, who was born and raised in Vietnam and is a member of the SVD AUS Province, says his study was an attempt at doing mission in dialogue with culture.

It’s been a time of farewells and new beginnings for some of the SVD missionaries in the Thailand District of the AUS Province, with the Bishop of Udon Thani reassigning them to take on new challenges in a different area of the diocese.

The SVDs had been working in the area of Ban Dung in northern Thailand for some time, taking care of large parishes as well as small, deserted churches in different villages. Their new assignments will take three of the confreres to another province, BuengKan, which borders Laos.

Fr Alejandro de la Sotta SVD arrived in New Zealand to take up his new post of chaplain to Auckland’s Latino community on March 17 – two days before the nation’s borders closed and people were ordered to stay at home to try and beat the coronavirus.

“I arrived, and a week later, the government announced a national quarantine,” he says.

The Janssen Spirituality Centre in Victoria is living out its mission of supporting both Christian and interfaith spirituality, by hosting a range of groups who meet to share holy reading through Lectio Divina.

Lectio Divina is a meditative reading of scripture or other holy reading, which, in the Western tradition has its roots reaching way back into early monasticism.

‘Together in the Spirit’ is the theme of the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Sunday this year (Sunday, July 5), and what a perfect theme it is as we all emerge slowly from this period of COVID-19 isolation.

We might still be maintaining our social distance and our gatherings are still only small, but as Australians and as Christians, we are ‘Together in Spirit’ – something my recent years as a missionary in Central Australia really emphasised for me.