(ANS - Melbourne) - On 25 July, Fr Václav Klement, Councillor for East Asia and Oceania, began the Extraordinary Visitation of the Province of Australia - Pacific with headquarters in Ascot Vale, Melbourne, Australia. Fr Klement is coming two months after the memorable pastoral visit of the Rector Major to all six countries of Oceania.

During his two-month visit, Fr Klement will visit all fourteen communities in Australia, Fiji, New Zealand and Samoa, to strengthen the communion between the Rector Major and the confreres of the province, as stated in the letter announcing the visit. He will meet all the confreres, lay employees and members of the Salesian family.

This is the oldest Salesian province in Oceania, beginning with a community in Kimberley founded in 1923. It now has fourteen communities with ninety-five confreres and four novices (as of 1 January 2015), of fourteen different nationalities and an average age of sixty-two. In the inter-provincial student community in Clifton Hill, Melbourne there are seven confreres sent from the three provinces of the East Asia-Oceania Region. The Salesian Family is composed of seven different groups - SDB, FMA, Salesian Cooperators, Past Pupils of Don Bosco and Past Pupils of Mary Help of Christians, Sisters of Charity of Jesus and the Michaelites.

The province has a strong involvement in schools with about 8,100 students in ten Salesian schools. There are also twelve parishes and twenty public churches, two youth centres, a retreat house, a social work for young people at risk and a vibrant Salesian Youth Movement which was re-launched after World Youth Day in Sydney in 2008 and in Madrid in 2011.

The missionary spirit is strengthened by the Provincial Mission Office ASMOAF  (http://asmoaf.salesians.org.au) which opened thirty-five years ago, and more recently by the Cagliero Project for missionary volunteer service, founded in 2007  (http://www.cagliero.org.au).

With the slow decline in the number of confreres from a maximum of more than 120 in the 1990s, the number of full-time lay employees has grown to 2100. They identify well with Don Bosco, and now hold key posts in all the educational and pastoral works.

The visit comes six years after the previous one in 2009. It aims above all to ensure dynamic fidelity to the charism of Don Bosco. In particular, the continuing response to a high level of immigration in all four countries of the province requires pastoral creativity from all the confreres and the Salesian Family.  Thanks to the renewal of youth ministry in the last decade there have been some vocations to Salesian consecrated life, the first after many years in Australia. In 2015 there are four novices from the Pacific and one from Australia in the novitiate at Suva in Fiji.

During the extraordinary visit the 200th birthday of Don Bosco on 16 August will be celebrated by the Salesian Family at Chadstone College in Melbourne. After the Salesian Bicentenary Congress at Geelong - Melbourne from 19 to 24 January 2015, seventeen concrete recommendations emerged for the future of the Salesian charism in Australia and Pacific. The process of charismatic renewal continues in local communities during the visit.

As a visible sign of renewal desired by the GC27 the visitor will leave a large poster of the vine and the branches – the Salesian icon for the six years 2014 to 2020 -  in every community. (cf. John 15.1-11).

Published 28/07/2015