Indian priest, Father Thomas Joseph, 92, recalls his meeting with late Cardinal Joseph Cardijn, founder of the YCW.

The nonagenarian priest says he was totally unprepared when his archdiocese appointed him workers’ chaplain in 1950, www.ucanindia.in reports. His only brief was to help in Catholic workers’ faith formation and organize them for their socio economic welfare.

“It was mainly to keep them away from communists,” he said with hindsight.

Inexperienced as he was, he began visiting workers’ families and their leaders. “I found workers helplessness and marginalized from one generation to the other.”

Trade unions controlled only the organized workers and used them for political purposes. And there was none to take care of the unorganized.

“I too felt helpless. My long years of formation did not help,” the priest explained. So, he attended a course in industrial relation at the Oxford University.

FULL STORY

Church needs to renew workers movement: Priest (ucanindia.in)

Dr Race Mathews

The Mondragon worker cooperatives founded by Father Jose-Maria Arizmendiarrietta in Spain's Basque region were inspired and launched through the enquiry method of the YCW, according to former Australian parliamentarian Dr Race Mathews.

The Mondragon cooperatives now employ over 80,000 workers in 17 countries.

"The cooperatives' triumph is attributable overwhelmingly to key attributes that set them aside from comparable conventional enterprises," Dr Mathews writes in Eureka Street.

"Not to be overlooked are the conceptual framework that underlies the cooperatives, as well as the enduring solidarity and subsidiarity values that enliven them. These are the legacy to the cooperatives of their founder, the Basque priest Don Jose Maria Arizmendiarrieta.

"Internalised and in part secularised as the values and framework have so largely become, they stem directly from the unswerving adherence by Arizmendiarrieta to formation in the 'see, judge, act' or 'inquiry' study circle mould, as developed within the Young Christian Workers unionist movement.

"As recalled by one of the five lay co-founders of the cooperative group, 'Father Arizmendi organised specialist courses on sociology to which he invited economics professors ... His ecclesiastical training led him towards being a practical apostle. He not only tried to give guidelines on what should be the model for the ideal enterprise, but he put that social enterprise to which he aspired into practice.'

"The benefits of this model of industry underpinned by Catholic social values are manifold," Dr Mathews concludes.

But, "why is the Church in the English speaking world so largely silent about the Mondragon cooperatives' success in bringing to fruition the long struggle in the cause of its social teachings?" Dr Mathews asks.

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Catholic social solutions to workplace fairness (Eureka Street)

explains the influence of the YCW and Cardijn on Father Jose-Maria Arizmendiarrietta, the founder of Mondragon workers cooperatives in Spain.

New Zealand trade unionist talks about his experience with imprisoned Thai ex-YCW fulltimer Somyot Pruksakasemsuk.

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YCW Metro Manila Action Monograph 2010 (Joeygevangelista)

Fifteen-year-old Catholic Regional College St Albans student Teresa Ho was killed on Monday at Ginifer station in Melbourne's north-west when she strayed into the path of a full-tilt V-Line train.

Now, I know the Ginifer railway station very well having worked for two years at Holy Eucharist parish which is located just a few hundred metres away.

Passing several times daily through the same flimsy pedestrian boom gate where Teresa died, I witnessed many instances in which people would race across in a bid to catch the train that had just gone through.

I still shudder to recall one young Sudanese boy who leaped across totally oblivious to the possibility of another train coming from the opposite direction. Unlike Teresa, the boy fortunately stayed safe on that occasion.

But I was so upset that I started asking among local community leaders to see what could be done about the crossing which has been rated as the fifth most dangerous in Melbourne. The inevitable response was a resigned kind of look that simply said yes, we have been complaining about it for years.

So I decided to write a letter. But to whom? The local MP? Connex (the previous operator)? Metlink Melbourne? And so it didn't take long for inertia to set in and I never did do it before I finished work in the parish in 2008.

I don't delude myself that it would have made any difference. After all, many locals have indeed been trying for decades to get action on both the Ginifer and St Albans crossings.

Thirty years ago, Tom Rigg, a now retired former station master, even came up with a plan to finance construction by developing the St Albans station into a commercial centre. To no avail.

Even though Ginifer station was somewhat ironically named after a well-regarded state Labor MP Jack Ginifer, many locals claim that the former Labor state government ignored their demands because it was one of the party's safest seats.

Nor has the current Liberal government shown the least interest in the problem, evidently preferring to favour its own seats.

What to do in the face of such naked political indifference?

I thought hard about that as I looked at a photo of Teresa's mum Tien Nguyen and her distressed school mates praying at the site of the terrible accident.

And it reminded of another incident in the late 1960s when a young YCW leader was killed in a car accident in Melbourne's suburbs, possibly at another level crossing.

I never knew the name of the guy but I do know the impact that his death had on his fellow YCW leaders who brought up the issue in one of their local meetings and decided that they had to act.

It was the start of a YCW Road Safety Campaign in the early 1970s that contributed significantly to the introduction of compulsory seat belts and the 0.05 alcohol limit in Victoria.

Could we launch a similar campaign today? Well, to quote a famous Catholic activist, Cesar Chavez, yes, we can! (Did anyone think Obama invented the line?)

True, the Melbourne YCW, which during the 1960s was the largest YCW movement that ever existed in any city in the world, was able to make it happen because it was organised and structured to do so.

Sadly, the sociological foundations of that YCW evaporated soon after sending the movement into a decline that lasted many years. Happily, the movement did not disappear and indeed the Melbourne YCW has just celebrated its 70^th anniversary with a promising resurgence.

Moreover, the method that made it successful – Cardijn's famous See Judge Act method – has now passed into official Catholic social teaching. This year in fact also marks the 50^th anniversary of Pope John XXIII's encyclical Mater et Magistra, which formally recognised the method (Para 236).

What's more the baby boomers who made the Melbourne YCW successful in the 1960s are mostly still around, albeit somewhat greyer. A few even still go to Mass on Sundays!

So what's to stop some of those well trained boomers from getting together with a few of their peers to begin to address the issues that afflict local communities today? Actually, some have already started to do so, e.g. a Cardijn Community team led by Kevin Vaughan is now tackling the issue of single fathers.

Moreover, what's to stop many other parishes and schools from taking the initiative to bring together new groups of young people to act on the issues that concern them?

The required tools are easily accessible. Each Friday, CathNews Perspectives publishes the Sunday Gospel that could be the basis of a weekly Gospel enquiry. Many easy guides to the See Judge Act are available on the web.

Seeing the flowers that mark the spot where Teresa Ho died, I was also reminded that Pope Pius XI once named St Theresa of Lisieux as the patron of the YCW.

Let every parish plant the seeds for many more flowers to grow. Yes, we can. We owe it to Teresa and her family.

- Stefan Gigacz

SOURCE

CathBlog - More flowers for Teresa (CathNews)

Jean Sangnier, a French World War II resistance hero and son of Sillon founder, Marc Sangnier, has died at the age of 99.

He was buried Wednesday after a funeral at the St Thomas Aquinas Church in Paris’s 7th District.

During World War II, Sangnier together with Emilien Amaury and others founded the so-called Groupe de Lille (or Groupe de Rue de Lille), one of the first organised resistance groups against the German occupation. One of the first tasks of the group was to work with another war hero, later executed by the Germans, Honoré d’Estienne d’Orves, who had been given the mission by General de Gaulle to set up the first radio links between occupied France and the free French forces in London.

Jean Sangnier also printed a range of clandestine resistance publications, including Défense de la France, Résistance, the Catholic paper Témoignage chrétien, as well as the communist paper L’Humanité. He also published the speeches of General de Gaulle.

All this from a covert printery located literally metres from the Abwehr, the headquarters of German military intelligence in France.

After surviving the war, Jean Sangnier went on to co-found the daily newspaper Ouest-France and became director of a well-known magazine, Marie-France.

And in 1990, he launched the Institut Marc Sangnier, named for his father, who had founded the Catholic lay movement, Le Sillon, or The Furrow.

St Francis behind the plough in the logo of the Sillon (Furrow) movement

Little known today, even in France, the Sillon, which existed from 1894 until 1910, was later described by the future Cardinal Joseph Cardijn as the “greatest lay initiative since the (French) Revolution”.

And the future Pope John XXIII, who as a young priest had heard Marc Sangnier speak in Rome in 1904, would also write that Sangnier senior’s “personality and his political and social activities are the most vivid memories of my sacerdotal youth”.

Marc Sangnier’s Sillon movement only existed from around 1894 when it began as a student group known as the Crypt at the Stanislas College in Paris, until 1910, when a letter from Pope Pius X to the French demanded that Sangnier and his confreres resign from the leadership of the Sillon and hand control to the diocesan bishops. Sangnier and colleagues did indeed resign but the result was the almost instantaneous collapse of the movement.

Nevertheless, the heritage of the Sillon lived on in many other movements. Cardijn’s see-judge-act methodology, which became the mainstay of later movements such as the Young Christian Workers and Young Christian Students and the MIJARC, was largely borrowed from the Sillon’s own “method of democratic education”.

In fact, the Sillon was the prototype for these later movements which emerged under the papacy of Pope Pius XI. Nor was it an accident that it was Pope John XXIII whose encyclical Mater et Magistra formally adopted the see-judge-act method as a part of Catholic social teaching and practice.

Marc Sangnier never got the credit for the role that the Sillon had played in the emergence of the later movements, although Cardijn certainly recognized it.

“It is the privilege and the reward of the sower of the ideal of life to be unable to limit the field that he seeds or to constrain the range of his fertile gesture. The winds of the air and the birds of the sky carry off this seed and deposit it sometimes far away, in a field where God’s makes it fruitful and multiplies it,” Cardijn told Marc Sangnier in 1921 in an explicit (but unpublished) acknowledgment of his influence.

In any event, Jean Sangnier was very pleased when I published an article in 1997 detailing the role that the Sillon had played in the emergence of the YCW and other lay movements, including the American Catholic Worker.

As with his father, Jean Sangnier’s achievements have often remained in the shadows. All the more reason to offer this small tribute to a man who was in effect the last living link to the Sillon.

- Stefan Gigacz

SOURCE

Last link to the Sillon disappears at 99 (Give us this day)

In an address to the University of Notre Dame Australia, Archbishop Barry Hickey of Perth has called for a renewal of the see, judge, act based small group methodology.

"A formidable formation programme struggles but still exists in this Archdiocese that I want to put to you," he said.

"It is based on a review of daily life. Small groups critique unjust situations in the light of the Gospel and make a commitment to action.

"The steps are summed up in three words – SEE, JUDGE and ACT.

"It has already produced strong leaders in public life and needs to be revived again if laypeople are to fulfill their special task in the world, as the Church has asked them to do.

"In brief, make the Gospels your study text.

"Read about others who have gone before you. Find a group of like-minded friends to talk about all this together.

"Live a good life, free of sin, and, most important of all, pray. Speak to Christ as your friend, and then listen.

"Carry Him in your heart after Holy Communion, then carry Him into the world.

"In your family life, cultivate an awareness of the world around you and help your children to understand that they too are called to make a difference in the world, when they grow to maturity, in order to build up the sort of world that Jesus wants," says Archbishop Hickey.

READ THE FULL TEXT HERE

Go where I cannot go, transform the world and bring it to Christ: Hickey(The Record)

Father Charles Rue recalls the formative influence of the YCW and the See Judge Act method in this article from the Australian Columban magazine.

06.06.2011


I am grateful to the YCW for the insights it has given me and the courageous example of people systematically applying faith to their real life situations.

My first memory of the YCW (Young Christian Workers) was in the 1950s when the curate in our rural parish proposed to us young men who had just left school to establish a local branch. The YCW and the YCS (Students) was the alive Catholic action of the day that applied faith to life. We discussed the idea but decided that we would rather join the local Junior Farmers. That group was seen as Protestant (later proved to be wrong), but we saw it as more related to our lives as budding farmers.

My next encounter was a YCW information camp for seminarians run by Fr Frank Marriott in the 1960s. A vivid memory was hearing the story of a young worker who could not read well. Rather than give him some spiritual book, he was first given a ‘western’. We were informed that there had to be some immediate interest in reading for him. I thought this was a very practical approach.

In South Korea in the 1970’s I was assigned to be chaplain to a YCW group of girls working in a cloth factory. At each meeting they described their life as workers in the factory, reflected on it in the light of faith and then decided on an action to try. They reported back on the action at the next meeting.

See-Judge-Act Method

This is the tried and tested YCW method: See-Judge-Act. They described the lack of heaters in the factory leading to fights among the workers. Their action in ‘turning the other cheek’ was to stand back from the heaters. They reported that they were too cold; the fights continued.

READ THE FULL STORY HERE

The strong influence of YCW (Australian Columbans)

Young Polish priest Father Karol Wojtyla lived at the Pontifical Belgian College in Rome from 1946 to 1948 while he was doing his doctoral studies at the Angelicum.

There he met Monsignor Joseph Cardijn who also stayed at the college during his regular trips to meet Vatican officials and the Pope.

“Karol Wojtyla was very interested in this pastoral movement aimed at young workers. He was very interested in bringing this experience to Poland, especially when he became a bishop,” says Father Dirk Smet, who is the current rector of the College.

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The first residence of Karol Wojtyla in Rome (Rome Reports)

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YCS Singapore Orientation Video 2011 (Jaheiro24/YouTube)

Dutch historian Jo Schoormans has published a new article on the history of the Sri Lankan YCW and the role of Dutch-born YCW chaplain Father Henk Schram.

"From far Ceylon five former Young Christian Workers, now Sisters of Our Lady of Perpetual Help, come and show you [by way of letter] their gratitude and sympathy." Belgian nuns wrote these words in 1947 to Joseph Cardijn, who was reputed as the great man of the YCW, writes Jo Schoormans.

"Some of the Sisters of Ragama, who payed a tribute to Joseph Cardijn, owed their religious vocation to the YCW. At the time, they were too busy caring for tubercular patients, unabling them to build up a youth movement. The sisters yearned for the opportunity of sacrificing themselves.0

"'Ceylon's sun is not too hot. The deaf and blind who have been entrusted to us, are not too exacting. Our beloved ones are not too far away, if one has good intentions and knows for whom one is working', a sister wrote. In 1948, sisters could already inform YCW international headquarters of a movement of Catholic young workers in Colombo, led by fathers Oblates of Mary Immaculate.

Read the rest of Jo Schoorman's article here:

Henk Schram (1919 - 84), Father of the workers

This video produced by YCS members from Ursula Frayne Catholic College in Perth, Western Australia looks at the difference that fair trade makes to chocolate producers from poor communities.

SOURCE

YCS- Fair Trade- What's Really In Your Chocolate