The original missionary goal of the Secular Institute founded by Fr. Arnold Janssen (1837-1909) in Steyl (1875) was the direct proclamation of the Divine Word, intentionally completed through education and scientific activity at the service of the proclamation. The Statutes of the Mission House of 1876/2 stated: “The purpose of our Society is the spreading of the word of God on earth, especially by evangelizing activity among those non-Catholic peoples where this activity would prove most fruitful. In the first place we mean the pagan peoples, especially those in the Far East.” At the First General Chapter in 1884-1886, when the Secular Institute became a religious congregation through the adoption of religious vows, the SVD capitulars confirmed the proclamation of the Divine Word as the foremost obligation in the charism of the Society. They made the word of God the identifying feature of the Society. The Divine Word was inherently framed into the overall Trinitarian dynamic of the Founder’s mission understanding to be implemented by the missionaries in docility to the guidance of the Holy Spirit. Fr. Arnold struggled to remain faithful to his distinctive charism while taking on new mission foundations for the Society.

But there was also the secondary goal of teaching and scientific activity to provide the Society with a solid foundation to get involved in education which entailed collaboration with laity through schools and in research which provided the missionaries with a deeper understanding of the local historical and cultural contexts. Furthermore, this latter activity also contributed significantly to the overall knowledge of the history and culture of the local ethnicities in China and played a valuable role in the preservation of the Chinese national heritage.

The Founder advocated the inclusion of the natural sciences in the missionary formation. The promotion of experiments and training in research methods equipped missionaries with a better sense of realism to diminish the factor of wishful thinking. Fr. Arnold was concerned for a thorough intellectual formation of his missionaries, which included the study of natural, social and missiological sciences. He encouraged them to study the indigenous peoples and asked them to report on these matters in publications in Europe. Such an orientation contributed essentially to the successes of the Divine Word Missionaries in the fields of ethnology, anthropology, religious studies, and linguistics. The journal Anthropos was founded (1906) and the Anthropological Institute in St. Gabriel (1931). Moreover, the Society developed its own anthropological tradition embodied in its world-renowned scholar, Fr. Wilhelm Schmidt.

This dual track of missionary goal, implemented in formation and work, finds its expression in this publication composed of two parts, which in a complementary way intend to show the Founder’s specificity of the original goal. The investigation tracks the question that arises as to what extent were the Divine Word Missionaries inspired by the Founder’s original charism. But the responses must also consider the nature of the charism which remains always a dynamic and interpretative reality, as it was already during the lifetime of the Founder. This dynamic captured tellingly the post-conciliar superior general of the Society, Fr. John Musinsky (1967–1977) who, reflecting on the charism of the Society, stressed that the charism is not static but constitutes a genuine unfolding of the original inspiration shaped by the history of the community and needs to be adapted to new times and places. This demands the continuous return to the sources of the Christian life and to the original inspiration conveyed by the Founder.

This present study provides a kind of mixture that includes a variety of SVD missions and missionaries located in two distant continents where the Society developed dynamic mission activity. Therefore, the research has been structured into two different parts. It seems at first sight to refer to two incompatible and distant geographical and historical realities. But, in essentials, it reports on different methodological and strategic choices to match the differentiated local realities. The Founder’s unique missionary charism was expressed through different methodological procedures. The research in two parts contains two different founding and biographical approaches to render justice to the multiform implementation of the Society’s missionary charisma in its missionary outreach in Latin America and China.

The first part on the SVD Latin American foundations discusses the genesis and character of each foundation and the adapted methodologies in the founding process and in later developments. The study takes into consideration the historical momentum of each foundation by situating it in the local and national context that presented missionary challenges in the proclamation of the Gospel. When the Society of the Divine Word opened its second-oldest mission field among German immigrants in Argentina (1889), it was a groundbreaking decision in its history. The decision resulted from clarifying the Society’s founding charism in a time of a serious dilemma. As a consequence, another twenty different missions were undertaken in Latin America in the span of a century (including six islands in the West Indies). This work partially highlights their history and development in chronological sequence of the foundations in five general areas, which reflect the prevailing original missionary goal of the Society: to supply priests where there were shortages, to ensure Christian education through schools, to take care of the indigenous populations, to get vocations, and, in more recent times in the late 1990s, to implement the characteristic dimensions of the Society. The research provides the possibility of comparing the original founding objectives of the Society with more recent developments and shifts in missionary understanding. It pays attention to the binding motivations and ways of proceeding applied by the General Administration and the “Founding Fathers” of the missions in taking up new foundations and their interplay with external factors and bishops who requested the SVD presence in their ecclesiastical territories.

The second part of the investigation with a biographical approach deals with various mission situations of the first mission of the Society in China (1882). It focuses mainly on the secondary aspect of the Society’s charism through research work performed by its missionaries in the Middle Kingdom. This part is a collection of over twenty biographies of Divine Word Missionaries bound by a common interest to conduct research on the historical, cultural, and religious background of their missionary work. Overall, the research displays various aspects related to the time-conditioned implementation of the original charism of the Society in different historical and cultural circumstances.