OCEANIA/PAPUA NEW GUINEA - From tribes to seminaries: vocations in rural areas are on the rise

Port Moresby (Agenzia Fides) - This young Church has no vocations crisis. The Catholic Church in Papua New Guinea is expecting the visit of Pope Francis in a few weeks. The Bishop of Rome will stop in the country for just over two days on the record-breaking journey of his pontificate (four countries on two continents, a total of more than 33,000 kilometers by plane and car), where, among the many commitments on the agenda, there will also be a meeting with the missionaries.

It is also thanks to the missionaries that the seminaries in Papua New Guinea are filling up more and more every year. In the country on the Pacific Ocean there are three small seminaries, two preparatory seminaries and four large seminaries.
According to official data from the Dicastery for Evangelization, in the last training year (2023/2024) two of the four major seminaries had 159 seminarians from almost all the dioceses in the country. The year before there were just under a hundred. In 2021/2022 there were seventy.

The work of the missionaries who proclaim the Gospel in the cities and especially in the hut and stilt villages nestled between ancient trees and long rivers is bearing fruit. The Good News is proclaimed every day in a rural environment where people never go hungry thanks to fertile soil. The elderly, or rather the wise, are a minority. The vast majority are young families with several children. And it is precisely the youngest who, fascinated by the encounter with Christ, ask for baptism (to give an example: twenty-two baptisms, including adults, teenagers, children and infants, were recently carried out in the chapel of the Holy Spirit Seminary in Bomana).

After the sacrament, the growth in faith and the spiritual guidance of the missionaries go so far that many set out to become priests. Young men from different tribes come to the seminaries. Depending on the latitude in which they grew up, you see seminarians with lighter or darker skin, physically fit or slimmer. And while recent news report several clashes between the different tribes, ethnicity plays no role at all in the seminaries.

The formation of future priests is also entrusted by the Episcopal Conference (which brings together the bishops of Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands) to missionaries, in particular the Vincentians and the Divine Word Missionaries, who have recently acquired a valuable instrument: the national "Ratio Fundamentalis Sacerdotalis", recently approved by the Dicastery for the Clergy.

This young Church therefore still needs support, as it begins to take its first steps on its own, accompanied by Polish, Filipino and Australian missionaries. (F.B.) (Agenzia Fides, 2/8/2024)

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