Information service of the Pontifical Mission Societies since 1927
Phoenix (Agenzia Fides) - The mission of the Indonesian Catholic community crosses the Ocean and arrives in the United States, through the work of two apostles: Franciscan Father Samuel Nadasa Himawan OFM of Jakarta, and of Jesuit Fr. Stefanus Hendrianto SJ. Both received the sacrament of priestly ordination in the United States and were incardinated in their respective religious provinces - one Franciscan, the other Jesuit - in the States. their life and pastoral commitment will bear witness to the gift and evangelizing spirit of the Indonesian Catholic Church, open to the missio ad gentes.
Father Samuel Nadasa Himawan became a priest in Phoenix, Arizona, on 3 December 2019. In his youth years, after studying in Jakarta, he traveled to the USA for a specialization in engineering at Oklahoma State University. Here he began his professional career and here he met the Franciscan religious life and the spirit of Francis of Assisi. Having taken this vocation seriously, he became a Friar Minor in the Franciscan Province of Oakland in August 2016. He received the diaconal ordination from the bishop of Phoenix, Mgr. Thomas J. Olmsted, in 2018 and now, having become a priest, is preparing to fully live his apostolate as a priest and a Franciscan friar.
A few months ago, in July, Fr. Stefanus Hendrianto SJ was ordained a priest in America.
As a young man he was very attentive to society and politics and was also a member of the People's Democratic Left Party (PRD). Then he studied abroad, first in the Netherlands, at the University of Utrecht, and later at the Faculty of Law at the University of Washington in Seattle, USA.
His felt his religious vocation while he was a university student when he met a Dominican priest at the Catholic Newman Center University in Washington. Stefanus then decided to enter the Society of Jesus after meeting Fr. Robert Spitzer, Jesuit professor at Gonzaga University of Spokane, Washington.
Mission today is no longer just the "traditional" one characterized by the North-South movement and the sending of missionaries from Europe to "mission lands". Today evangelization has a dynamism that proceeds in all directions: even from South to North or from East to West. Countries that in the past received missionaries for the work of evangelization, such as Indonesia, return the gift to nations of ancient Christian tradition. (MH) (Agenzia Fides, 6/12/2019)
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