The St Arnold Janssen Chapel community at Marsfield celebrated Bible Sunday this month with Mass followed by refreshments and fun activities, with the highlight being the ‘graduation’ of seven participants in the Bible Timeline study program.

Fr Dom Flores SVD says it was a wonderful occasion to celebrate the commitment of those who had undertaken the study program at Marsfield and also at the SVD parish of Macquarie Fields.

About 50 young people and 10 adults from St Maximilian Kolbe Parish, Kingston-Marsden and the surrounding community rugged up for a cold night sleeping in the parish carpark as part of the Vinnies Winter Sleepout 2016.

The Sleepout, which took the theme, ‘Compassion in Action, was an initiative of the parish youth group, called Kolbe Youth, and was part of a series of activities held throughout the year to promote faith formation based on the action-reflection model.

Internationally renowned theologian and missiologist, Fr Roger Schroeder SVD is currently in Australia delivering a range of presentations and workshops on different aspects of Mission, including the theology of indigenous peoples and interculturality.

Fr Roger is the Professor of Intercultural Studies and Ministry and the Louis J. Luzbetak SVD Professor of Mission and Culture at Chicago’s Catholic Theological Union (CTU).

This year the World Youth Day will be celebrated in the city of Krakow, Poland from the 25th to 31st July 2016. Young people from around the world will assemble in Poland. The World Youth Day of 2013 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil that I attended is always in my mind.

I will share a few thoughts about the effect WYD had on me as a person. I had a great experience of personal conversion being with the young people. Young people long to experience the love of God and the experience of being loved by others.

Iato Olivier Noclam was born in Tanna, Vanuatu and grew up in a traditional village where life was simple and neither Jesus, or Christianity, were ever mentioned. Today, Olivier is a Divine Word Missionary in Alice Springs, where he is immersing himself in the language and culture of the Arrernte people and reaching out to those in need, especially prisoners in jail.

“I grew up in a very simple and traditional village known as Lamnatu, where life depended very much on what land provided. We were all related and everybody knew each other. Life was simple, there was lack of finance, but everyone had a piece of land and grew what was necessary to live,” he says.

The Janssen Spirituality Centre (JSC) in Boronia, Victoria, is headed for a new lease of life which will embrace and develop the original vision for the Centre to be a place of welcome for interfaith and intercultural relations.

The JSC, named in honour of St Arnold Janssen SVD, was opened in January 2008, as a venue dedicated to the promotion of inter-religious and cross-cultural relations. The Centre was dedicated to mutual understanding and enrichment, respect and collaboration, among followers of various cultures and faith traditions.

For the people of Nhulunbuy in isolated East Arnhem Land, Northern Territory, a regular Catholic priest has been hard to come by in recent times, but after providing priestly supply services there, and seeing the need of the people, Fr Jan Szweda SVD offered to move in as Parish Priest, and despite the challenges, he’s loving it.

Bishop Eugene Hurley appointed Fr Jan as Parish Priest of Nhulunbuy and Groote Eylandt earlier this year and since then, Fr Jan has been doing his best to build a parish community – not an easy task in a largely transient mining population.

Fr Henry Adler SVD has been re-elected as ProvinciaI-Superior of the Divine Word Missionaries AUS Province for a second three-year term.

Fr Henry was re-elected Provincial by his confreres for a second three-year term and the election was approved recently by the SVD Generalate in Rome.

Well greetings, friends! This month’s message for our In the Word E-News comes from me, Fr Raas, rather than from Fr Henry, who is taking his home leave at the moment.

Do you remember Pope Francis’ encyclical letter, Laudato Si? It gave us so much food for thought about how we should care for our common home, but what have we done to take up the challenges it contained?

Mission and culture are essential characteristics of an SVD; and with the two years Cross-Cultural Training Program, I was given a taste in different ministerial settings.

They included teaching English at the local high school, working with Vietnamese migrant workers, visiting the poor, engaging in parish ministries, and helping HIV/AIDS patients, in particular, teenagers living with HIV at The Mother of Perpetual Help Foundation in Nongbualamphu, Thailand.