- svd-generalate
- / Leadership /
- July 1, 2026
From Discernment to Identity: New SVD Superiors Chart a Missionary Future
Kasmir Nema, SVD
Halfway through the Workshop for New SVD Province, Region, and Mission Superiors (PRMs), the gathering at Centro Ad Gentes turned from a demanding question about the Congregation’s future to the concrete pillars that must ground it. Across a keynote from the Superior General, a session on synodal leadership, and four thematic presentations on mission identity, the newly appointed Superiors were given both a vision of where SVD is heading and a working language for leading their Provinces, Regions, and Missions there.
Three Paths to 2050
The Superior General, Fr. Anselmo Ribeiro, SVD, opened the session not with a policy review but with an invitation to shared discernment. “How can we redesign our missionary presence to respond to today’s realities?” he asked the assembly — a question aimed less at preserving existing structures than at asking how Provinces, Regions, and Missions can better serve the Missio Dei through courageous decisions and strategic investment in people and mission.
He laid out three possible trajectories for the Congregation. The first, internal decline, would see western provinces continue to shrink without significant reorganization, leaving many European communities dependent on international staff and straining schools, parishes, retreat centers, and social services.
The second, intercultural rebalancing, envisions provinces investing deliberately in intercultural formation, shared leadership, and missionary outreach — a path in which numerical decline would not necessarily mean a loss of vitality.
The third, missionary renewal, points to a more radical reimagining of mission itself: not religious moving from the Global South to the North simply to fill gaps, but a genuine exchange between Churches built on truly international communities rather than models of replacement.
Underlying all three scenarios, Fr. Ribeiro argued, is a broader truth about Catholic male religious life worldwide: it is not simply in decline but is being transformed in its geography, composition, and missionary language. While contraction in Europe and North America is real and structural, Africa and Asia are entering a new historical phase — one that will require religious families to rethink governance, formation, the sustainability of their works, and intercultural communion.
Looking toward 2050, he said, the Congregation’s future will depend less on nostalgia for past forms of religious life than on its capacity to build evangelical, austere, fraternal, and missionary communities capable of engaging emerging cultures. Statistics, in this light, are not merely numbers but indicators of ecclesial discernment.
He offered the Superiors a sobering statistical portrait: since the Society’s founding in 1875, 25,276 people have entered the Congregation. Of these, 12,657 have since left. Of the 12,619 who remained, 7,038 have died — figures that quietly underline both the scale of SVD’s missionary sacrifice and the urgency of the discernment now underway.
Synodality as Spiritual and Structural Renewal
The reflection continued with a testimony from the General Leadership Team of the Missionary Servants of the Holy Spirit (SSpS) — Sr. Maria Angelica Altenhofen, SSpS, Sr. Mikaelin Bupu, SSpS, Sr. Mariana Camezzana, SSpS and Sr.Gretta Maria Fernandes, SSpS— who shared their experience of synodal leadership, highlighting participation, co-responsibility, and communal discernment as lived practices and offering the Superiors a sisterly, concrete example of synodality in action.
A parallel session presented synodality not as an administrative mechanism but as a path of spiritual renewal and structural reform, enabling a Church that is more participatory and missionary — one able to walk with every man and woman. Central to this vision is the Church becoming a “home and school of communion,” where external structures risk becoming empty forms without interior conversion and disciplined listening.
The session also offered internal critique. Drawing on SVD’s AFRAM zonal assembly recommendations, presenters noted that valuing interculturality and internationality eases tension and builds collaboration, while favoring particular groups over common policy runs counter to synodal leadership — and that leadership can sometimes favor the status quo over transformation, a challenge directly relevant to the Superiors at Nemi. Becoming a synodal Church, the session concluded, requires authentic conversion in how members relate to one another: relationships are not merely a strategy for efficiency but the means through which God has revealed himself in Jesus and the Holy Spirit.
Four Pillars of Mission Identity
Having wrestled with the Congregation’s future direction, the workshop’s following sessions grounded the Superiors in four concrete dimensions of missionary identity: mission animation, the biblical apostolate, communication, and justice, peace, and the integrity of creation (JPIC).
Fr. Wojciech Szypula, SVD, focused on the foundational role of Scripture in SVD identity.
Mission Animation. Fr. Marcelo Cattaneo, SVD, the Generalate’s Mission Secretary, framed the Church not as a single beacon but as a communion of small lights sustained by the Spirit. Compassion and authenticity — not the pre-Vatican II model of unquestioned authority — now give it credibility, he said. He traced SVD’s progression from missio ad gentes to missio inter gentes, missio cum gentibus, and today’s missio ad vulnera — mission to the wounds of a fractured world — calling SVD members to be “wounded healers” witnessing from within that brokenness. This trajectory, crystallized at the XV General Chapter (2000), gave rise to SVD’s self-description as prophetic dialogue, expressed through four Characteristic Dimensions: rootedness in the Word, commitment to the poor, transcultural witness, and interreligious encounter.
The Word. Fr. Wojciech Szypula, SVD, centered the second session on Scripture as foundational to SVD identity. “The Bible is not a department,” he told the Superiors. “It is the heart of this Society.” He pointed to a growing number of dioceses requesting SVD confreres to organize biblical ministry, a trend he connected to Pope Benedict XVI’s earlier call for the whole Church to return to a Scripture-rooted faith — stressing that the pastoral need is less for additional meetings and more for someone willing to open the Word with people and remain present with them.
Fr. Richard Quadros, SVD, concluded the series by presenting five discernment questions.
Communication. Fr. Kasmir Nema, SVD, the Generalate’s Coordinator for Communications, framed communication ministry through the biblical contrast between Babel and Jerusalem — the first representing communication used to concentrate power and flatten difference into uniformity, the second communication built on listening, care for the vulnerable, and wisdom that extends beyond algorithmic logic. He noted that Pope Leo XIV’s Magnifica Humanitasrevisits this same choice in the context of artificial intelligence, and reminded participants that the Word became flesh, not information, and that the SVD Constitutions describe communication as an act of self-giving love. Presenting data from a 2025 survey, he reported that only 31 of 58 Provinces, Regions, and Missions worldwide — roughly 53 percent — had submitted reports on their communication ministry, framing the gap not as a technological shortfall but as a question of whether communication is still understood as integral to mission or has been relegated to administration.
Justice, Peace, and Integrity of Creation. Fr. Richard Quadros, SVD, the Generalate’s JPIC coordinator, closed the sequence by proposing five discernment questions for major institutional decisions on property, investment, new schools, or formation programs: Does this promote human dignity? Does it contribute to justice and peace? Does it protect creation? Does it empower the marginalized? Does it reflect the missionary priorities of the Congregation? He identified formation houses, parishes, and schools and universities as key spheres where JPIC commitments are either lived out or allowed to lapse into administrative routine, calling on the new Superiors to treat justice not as a separate department but as the foundation underlying mission animation, the biblical apostolate, and communication alike.
One Missio Dei, Many Expressions
Taken together, the days at Nemi offered the new Superiors a single, unfolding movement: a demanding vision of where the Congregation must go, and four concrete dimensions — animation, the Word, communication, and justice — for how to get there. None of these, presenters insisted, stand as separate portfolios; each is an expression of the same Missio Dei that the Congregation continues to discern and live out. As the Workshop moves toward its final days, the new Superiors carry with them a renewed language — synodal, intercultural, relational — for leading their Provinces, Regions, and Missions into that future.
