Preparations are underway for the Extraordinary Missionary Month of October 2019, which will be full of initiatives and which, for Catholics in Vietnam, will be a precious opportunity to rediscover their baptismal call to evangelization. Fides News Agency interviewed Fr. Dominique Ngo Quang Tuyen, priest of Ho Chi Minh City, Secretary-General of the Commission for Evangelization in the Vietnamese Bishops’ Conference who oversaw the translation into Vietnamese and dissemination of the various documents of the Pope and the Holy See concerning the imminent celebration of the Extraordinary Missionary Month.
«In order to prepare ourselves to celebrate the Extraordinary Missionary Month,» Fr. Dominique Ngo Quang Tuyen said. «We are organizing some seminars and several meetings at a national and diocesan level. In July we celebrated two meetings in the diocese of Ba Ria, in which delegates from all over the country took part, to study the documents proposed by the Holy See and to deepen the theme ‘Baptized and sent: the Church of Christ on mission in the world’.
«These were two important and fruitful moments. Fr. Fabrizio Meroni, Secretary-General of the Pontifical Missionary Union, and Archbishop Giampietro Dal Toso, President of the Pontifical Mission Societies, sent their messages of encouragement. Our local Church has mobilized. In the Diocese of Ho Chi Minh City, we enjoy the help and experience of the congregation of Foreign Missions in Paris. In the diocese of Dalat, we gathered the professors of the ten Major seminars for an annual formation session, to study, deepen and rediscover the Maximum Illud, one hundred years after its dissemination.»
«In August, the work of formation does not stop: in the first week of August all the priests of Phu Cuong Diocese will participate in a seminar dedicated to the missionary month while another session is dedicated to the heads of the 27 diocesan Commissions for evangelization and to the representatives of the missionary congregations in Vietnam. To all this, we must add the various programs and preparatory meetings proposed in the various dioceses, in collaboration with the Pontifical Mission Societies, always with the intention of reawakening the missionary spirit in the faithful.»
