When the Sisters of Mercy first answered the call to work in Papua New Guinea in 1956, they found themselves working alongside religious men from the congregation of the Divine Word Missionaries. In her marvellous recounting of the story of the Sisters of Mercy in Papua New Guinea, Sr Teresa Flaherty notes that the two
congregations became, in many ways, ‘companions in mission as Mercy foundations and communities spread in dioceses under the Church jurisdiction of Divine Word Missionary bishops’. . This strong relationship has continued and in the past decade, the Institute of the Sisters of Mercy of Australia and Papua New Guinea (IMSAPNG) have worked with the Divine Word University (established in Madang in 1996) to provide ongoing spiritual and theological formation to religious sisters of different congregations at diploma and advanced diploma level. To this end well-qualified female lecturers in the fields of systematic and moral theology, scripture, liturgy and sacraments, ecclesiology, missiology, sociology and Catholic social teaching, communications, culture and church history have provided intensive courses of study at a number of sites spread throughout PNG – and more recently also in the Solomon Islands’ capital of Honiara. Currently all the lecturers are drawn from
Australia, but the end goal of the project is to have a cohort of indigenous sisters themselves as lecturers.