TURIN: 29
September
2013
--
If we take 1999 as our starting point, the year Vietnam
Province sent
out its first missionary, 29 September 2013 sees the 100th
Vietnamese
missionary. That is no mean achievement!
Of the 36 SDB missionaries that will be sent out from Valdocco
today,
29 September 2013 as part of the 144th Missionary Expedition,
13 are
from Vietnam - 11 of them directly, having completed their
postnovitiate, two others from elsewhere - one who grew up in
the US
and has already gone to Jerusalem for his theological studies,
since
the academic year there began on 11 September, and another
from Japan,
already working there as a young priest.
Of the 11 who have come directly from Vietnam, 9 are
candidates for the priesthood, two are brothers.
Vietnamese missionaries can now be found on every continent.
In general
the staying power of these young missionaries has been
excellent, as
they adapt to language and culture far removed from their own.
and with
such a large number of missionaries now out there 'in the
field',
Vietnam is already thinking of how it might set up a Mission
Office
which can offer support.
A sense of what this missionary diaspora is like, and how it
sets
people thinking, comes from a letter written by a young
Salesian in
Southern Africa, when one of the Vietnamese missionaries there
was
ordained this year:
Today I attended
the ordination of Fr Vincent (from Viet Nam). It was a
beautiful
celebration and offered me a missionary reflection: In his words of thanks he
had this to say to all who were present: "My parents are not here,
but I have you....". It struck me: here is this 'foreign man' ordained in a 'foreign language' to 'foreign people' and for 'foreign people', and yet nothing is 'foreign.
