ROME: 29th November 2007 -- After fourteen weeks in his
homeland, the Regional, Fr Klement, passed briefly (very!) through Rome
and immediately flew out to Korea to complete the last consultation for
a new provincial in the six year period 2002-8. He had just
finished the final Extraordinary Visitation of that term as well - in
the Czech Republic, which includes the mission territory of Bulgaria.
In fact, this has been his longest stay in his mother country since he
escaped from the Iron Curtain in 1984 in order to realise his
missionary dream.
During the visitation to a province with 178
confreres living and working in 18 communities, average age 52, with
one novice, the most frequently asked question was 'How can we
evangelise and educate young people to the faith?'. Fr Klement
found that the EAO daily life and experience of mission 'inter gentes'
came in handy here. In fact he adopted the Korean practice of
concluding the Eucharist each day with the exhortation 'Go, and
proclaim the Gospel!'.
CEP province focuses mainly on parish work (60) with
12 Youth Centres, then some specialised work like the Portal Publishing
House. It also runs a theological faculty with 1,000 students (at
Ceske Budejovice) and a School of Higher Education for Pedagogy, Social
Work and Theology. One confrere runs the unique Catholic TV
station NOE. The Salesians are the most numerous of the male
Congregations in the Czech Republic, and the Salesian Cooperators and
VDB have considerable apostolic impact in the field of catechetics,
youth ministry and family apostolate.
But to return to the EAO connection and proclaiming
the Gospel! BY and large, the Visitor found that the experience
of the relatively young Churches of East Asia and Oceania are inspiring
for the older Churches especially in post-communist central and eastern
Europe. He found that with a fresh missionary impulse there is some
sense of a fresh evangelisation.
Lat year European provincials and others from all
across Europe and its outreaches met at the request of the Rector
Major. The theme was 'Europe - mission territory'. The
Visitor found that while everyone is now more aware of this, not many
confreres are formed to be missionaries in their own land. One of
the conclusions he drew for the province was the need for this, and he
shared some thoughts on a future 'Salesian school for
evangelisation'. He drew on experiences in places like Indonesia,
Vietnam, Australia, China, the Philippines, Thailand, Korea - to name
some.
The Czech Republic clearly had a crash course in
missionary endeavour in EAO! There has already been some activity
by way of funding of projects in the EAO region and hopefully in a few
days time some funds will be forthcoming for the East Timor Post
Novitiate. The line Fr Klement took was 'We need each
other'. For regions like Moravia and Bohemia, with no access to
oceans, any kind of 'opening' is something fresh - and now the Salesian
Family in those areas are well acquainted with some details of Salesian
Family life in the myriad island nations of the EAO region.
Mongolia recently had a visit from the Prague
Caritas director, to look at a radio distance learning project there.
Salesians in the Ulanbaatar DB Tech Centre have presented him with some
projects. Fr Klement noted that around Prague one could hear
Mongolian spoken in the streets, along with Korean, Chinese,
Vietnamese, Japanese. Vietnamese make up a third of the most
numerous foreign workers in the Republic, some 50,000 of them.
Many Czech bishops are seeking Vietnamese speaking priests to help
minister to this diaspora.
Cebu's famed 'Santo Nino' is in fact a copy of the
Infant of Prague, venerated especially in the Carmelite Church for
centuries, in Prague. Fr Klement paused there to pray for the two
provinces in the Philippines and their numerous missionaries.
And one final note: the Czech Salesian Brothers have
taken advantage of material produced at the EAO Brothers meeting in
Cambodia in 2006. They have begun translating the material for their
own use. _________________ AustraLasia is an
email
service
for the Salesian Family of Asia Pacific. It also functions
as an
agency for ANS based in
Rome.
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