HCM, Vietnam - 02 June 2024 -- When Fr. Alfred Maravilla, General Councillor for Missions, was appointed by the Rector Major to do the extraordinary Visitation of our Vietnam Province, I was invited by Fr. Provincial to do the service of translator for the Visitor. It took the Visitor nine months to have an overall view of this province with 20 communities and 19 presences composed of about 360 confreres, 14 novices distributed within a distance of 2272 kilometres long.
As a translator of the Visitor, I was really a silent bystander. But I also had the unique privilege of visiting all presences and meeting all the confreres of the Province. My impression is that in general, the Province of Vietnam is so vibrant in its Salesian spirit and activities. Most confreres tirelessly work for the young and are doing their best to spread the Gospel and deepen Don Bosco’s charism in all of their presences.
However, like a coin with two sides, I realised that the Province of Vietnam is also facing some serious challenges that require its Superior and all confreres commitment and courage to acknowledge them and sit down to draw up the right strategy to overcome these.
The first challenge is to deepen mutual trust that could also help the Provincial in his duty to govern and animate the Province. One could say that this could be due to some lack of tact of those in authority that governance and animation are sometimes seen as control and inspection. But I believe it is above all rooted in some form of crisis of faith in some confreres. If we do not have the eyes of faith, everything is reduced to the human dimension. If all of us do not courageously face this, it could make our Province sterile.
The second challenge is a consequence of the first, namely, formalism. As the Visitor pointed out on several occasions, formalism appears in different settings of the Province. It has been implanted involuntarily through society, then nurtured and strengthened all the more by the highly clericalist context of the Vietnamese Church. Confreres, in many cases, relate to each other mainly by functions. Relationships become hide-and-seek rather than true, frank and credible fraternity.
And the last serious challenge is the child of the two, called lack of planning mentality. It is partly because confreres of the Province have had to struggle to be able to find ways to plant our Charism after 1975, which, sometimes, hinders them from the possibility of drawing up any overall development or strategic plan. However, the lack of an overall plan seen everywhere in the Province is also because confreres in many settings are not able to sit down to sincerely and wholeheartedly discuss or plan together. Consequently, individualism has silently penetrated the lives and apostolates of a certain number of confreres. Thus, the missionary spirit among confreres of the Province becomes weaker and weaker.
As I accompanied the Visitor for the past 9 months, I kept thanking the Lord that the Province of Vietnam is still blessed with great opportunities to spread the Gospel and strengthen the Salesian charism in this country. I hope all confreres will work hard to face these challenges so that the Province can continue the wonderful service it offers to poor young people and render a great contribution to the growth of Don Bosco’s charism in Vietnam.
In the final analysis, I realised that the 9 months of Extraordinary Visitation will bear fruit for the whole Province of Vietnam only if each and every confrere will seriously work on his own conversion of mind and heart!
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