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Volume 25 No. 1 | Autumn 2015
Fr Anton Bulla SVD, thankful
to God, as he celebrates 60
years in religious vows
Fr Anton Bulla SVD, who recently celebrated 60 years in
religious vows, says he is thankful to God for leading him
into missionary life and sustaining him in it, a vocation
which he believes has its seeds in a promise made by his
father on the battlefields of World War I.
Fr Anton’s father was a soldier in the Great War, running
telephone lines along the frontline.
“One day, on the Russian front, he came across an SVD
brother who was mortally wounded, but was crying out
in distress, ‘who will take my job if I die?’ My father asked
him what his job was and he said he was in charge of
distributing an SVD magazine,” Fr Anton says.
“So my father said, ‘I can do that for you’. Hearing this,
the brother said ‘Thanks be to God’, and died.”
As a result of that promise made in the heat of battle, Fr
Anton’s father took on the job of helping the Divine Word
Missionaries with their mission publications.
“So I got familiar with the SVD through this work of
my father’s,” he says. “We had books about mission all
around the house and I would read them. There was one
story I read as a boy about a missionary who went to
India and had to shoot a tiger. So from then on, I always
wanted to be a missionary in India.”
Fr Anton was born in Silesia, Germany in 1934, under the
Nazi regime, in an area that became Poland after World
War II.
With a hearing problem from birth, Fr Anton says he was
never a great student, but when he reached the end of
primary school, he decided to seek admission to the SVD
minor seminary and was accepted into the Mission House
in Nyssa on the 8th September, 1949.
After the Second World War, the communists took
over Poland and the government closed all the minor
seminaries of the religious orders.
“So I found myself again on the street,” he says. “But the
Society gave us a chance to enter the Novitiate and to finish
our schooling there. So I finished high school in the Novitiate
and then took up my studies in Philosophy and Theology.
Altogether, I lived there for 13 years, from 1952 to 1965.”
Fr Anton took his first vows in 1954, his final vows in
1960, and was ordained to the priesthood in 1961,
working at first as the secretary to the Provincial, as well
as teaching catechism.
In the mid-1960s, the communist regime began to allow
small numbers of missionaries to leave Poland and take
up mission assignments, and Fr Anton was among those
allowed to leave. The SVD assigned him to Papua New
Guinea, where he arrived in May, 1967.
His first assignment was to a mission station in Kerowagi,
where he worked in the school during the week and in
parishes on the weekend.
From 1971-74, Fr Anton was in charge of a catechist
school and then, in the early 1980s, he was asked by the
local bishop in PNG to go to Canada to study Canon
Law, with a view to setting up a marriage tribunal in his
diocese.
After completing the studies, he returned to PNG and
took up work in the marriage tribunal and parishes, until
heart problems meant he was unable to stay on in PNG.
“I wanted to go back to Poland then,” he says. “But they
didn’t have a job for me, so I came to Australia and I
don’t regret it.”
Since then, Fr Anton has worked in the marriage tribunal
of the Archdiocese of Sydney, a ministry he describes as a
healing ministry.
“The tribunal is nothing else than healing wounded
and broken relationships,” he says. “We do not judge
people. We just want the people to tell us the truth of the
situation, because Jesus told us the truth will set you free,
and that is the basis of our work.”
To celebrate his Diamond Jubilee in religious vows, Fr
Anton took a course for older SVD confreres in Nemi,
Italy, and was also able to travel home to Poland, even
taking a trip back to the same seminary where he spent
13 years in his youth.
“I am thankful to God, because he leads you in life,”
Fr Anton says. “It is important that we have a personal
relationship with God. Vocation is a call of God, which
develops slowly.
“For me, this call of God goes back to childhood. I have
to thank God that my father was so pious, and also
that he didn’t get shot in four years of standing on the
frontline in the war.”