Webinar: Marc Sangnier, the Sillon and the YCW

ACI secretary, Stefan Gigacz, will present our April webinar marking the 150th anniversary of the birth on 3 April 1873 of Marc Sangnier, founder of the French democratic movement, Le Sillon, which had such a great influence on Cardijn and the YCW.

Deeply impressed by Sangnier’s movement, young Cardijn would later describe it as “the greatest surge of faith and apostolate that France has known since the Revolution.”

Welcoming Sangnier to Brussels in 1921, Cardijn lamented the closure of the movement in 1910 after Pope Pius X called on its leaders to resign and explicitly linked himself and his work to the Sillon’s heritage.

“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 dew fertilises and multiplies it,” he told Sangnier.

The emerging YCW and other Specialised Catholic Action movements were the fruit of this inspiration with many early movement chaplains formed by the Sillon’s “method of democratic education,” which would provide the basis for Cardijn’s see-judge-act method of formation.

The Sangnier and Sillon influence also extended to the YCW’s sister movements, which would become known as the “Specialised Catholic Action” movements.

Across the Atlantic, Dorothy Day’s Catholic Worker also drew inspiration from the Sillon through her co-founder and mentor, Peter (Pierre) Maurin, who had also belonged to Marc Sangnier’s movement.

In 1950, Holy See nuncio, Angelo Roncalli, the future Pope John XXIII, would characterise Marc Sangnier as the greatest influence on his early priesthood.

Listen to the story of this remarkable man and his movement at our April webinar on Saturday 15 April.

WEBINAR DETAILS

Tuesday 11 April, 7.30pm (AEST)

REGISTER HERE

https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZMvfu2vrz8rGdO_wjR032j-kWBd-8XErAUZ

YCW Centenary History Project

Call for Contributors 

The YCW Centenary 2025

Perspectives from Oceania

Thirteen years after Joseph Cardijn and his collaborators launched their first experimental study circles with teenage girl needleworkers in the Brussels suburb of Laeken, the Young Christian Worker Movement was founded formally in 1925. It spread quickly across the globe. The method of ‘see-judge-act’ enabled a lay apostolate that saw faith as inextricably and powerfully connected to the whole of life. By 1966 the outward and public focus of YCW formation involved 4 million young people in 100 countries with a dozen allied movements, each committed to transforming the social context through shared reflection. The method impacted 10 of the 16 major documents of the Second Vatican Council and resourced ‘liberation theologies’ globally, not least through countless ‘mundane’ actions in the daily lives of members.

To mark the centenary of the foundation of the YCW, we aim to workshop and publish an edited collection of academic contributions on the YCW in Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific. We are interested to hear from writers across the academic disciplines (including, but not limited to business and labour history, education, gender studies, history, law, literature, sociology, theology and religious studies) to explore the variety of the YCW movement across time and the in diverse locations of Oceania in chapters of 4,000 – 7,000 words.

Topics to be explored include but, again, are not limited to:

  • Foundation stories of the YCW / NCGM in different regions
  • Contextual studies by decade and era: e.g. post-Second World War, into the 1960s, post Vatican II, through Vietnam War, into the 1980s
  • Sporting competitions
  • Migration initiatives
  • Colonial and post-colonial realities
  • Biographies
  • Trajectories of members after the movement
  • Co-operatives, credit unions and housing initiatives
  • Changes in the theological climate
  • Accounts of major actions – (e.g. Springbok tour, Adelaide’s freeway campaign, Walton’s campaign, Fitzroy Legal Service, apprentices)
  • YCW Extension Workers
  • YCW Chaplains
  • Formation programmes and conceptions of leadership
  • Transnational collaborations

For an overview of original sources, biographical material and existing studies, please see:

Joseph Cardijn Digital Library: https://www.josephcardijn.com

History of the Cardijn Movements in Australia: http://history.australiancardijninstitute.org/

Trove Timeline Cardijn Movements in the Media: https://timeline.austtaliancardijninstitute.org/

Please send a short abstract of up to 250 words and a biographical statement of up to 100 words to Anthony O’Donnell odonnellanthony21@gmail.com by 15 May 2023.

Acceptance will be advised by 31 May 2023.

Presentation at a hybrid workshop 27 October 2023

Revision of manuscripts for publication by 31 March 2024.

About the project team:

Anthony O’Donnell is an adjunct senior lecturer in the School of Law, La Trobe University. He researches and publishes in labour law, labour history and social policy. His most recent books are a biography of Moss Cass and a history of Australian unemployment policy. He was a member of TYCS in the 1980s.

Stefan Gigacz is an honorary post-doctoral researcher with Yarra Theological Union within the University of Divinity and secretary of the Australian Cardijn Institute. Previously, he worked for the YCW in Australia and internationally. His doctorate, and forthcoming book, The Leaven in the Council identifies the key role of Joseph Cardijn at the Second Vatican Council.

Katharine Massam is professor of history at Pilgrim Theological College within the University of Divinity. She has published extensively on the history of Catholicism in Australia, most recently A Bridge Between: Spanish Benedictine Missionary Women in Australia, with a particular interest in the spirituality of work.. She is a member of the board of the Australian Cardijn Institute.

Download the Call for Papers here:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1FBlSlkadmW_gHoMVTTuf6P81Jh0CYfF6/view?usp=sharing

Bob Wilkinson’s ‘New visions of priesting’

Driven by his conviction that the Catholic Church needs a new social movement led by young people and centred on “humanity and its common home, earth”, Adelaide priest Fr Bob Wilkinson has documented his involvement in the Young Christian Workers (YCW) movement founded by Belgian priest Joseph Cardijn.

New Visions of Priesting, an interview with Bob Wilkinson, published by ATF Press, looks at the different ministries Fr Bob has had in his almost 70 years of being a priest, the common element of which has been working with lay people as they participate in the life of the Church.

The book was launched in September after editor Hilary Regan conducted a series of interviews with Fr Bob as part of the Cardijn Studies journal.

Some of the 89-year-old priest’s reflections, influenced by his background in sociology, reflect on what could be called the glory days of the 50s and 60s, a time when “being Catholic was like being Australian, for better or for worse”.

“You lived in that Catholic world, it was so strong,” he said in an interview with The Southern Cross.

“We weren’t a persecuted minority but we were still energised by overtones that we had been (persecuted) and that we were coming to the top.

“There was a great sense of solidarity, we’d reached the middle class through the Catholic schooling system and we were taking our place socially.”

But the former editor of The Southern Cross insists the book wasn’t motivated by nostalgia for the past, rather by the “precious lessons” to be learnt from the YCW, Young Catholic Students and other lay movements to which he was chaplain over many years.

In fact, he is all too aware of the realities of today, claiming the drop in church attendances dates back to the 70s but is only being faced up to by clergy and leaders now as the churchgoers on Sunday become the “departing end of the Church as we know it”.

Most importantly, he is concerned about the absence of young people.

“Denying the fact of youth abandoning Mass would seem wilfully negligent. ‘Absent from Mass’ is not everything in a person’s spirituality. Most young people still consider themselves spiritual, rather than religious. But having less than five per cent Catholic young at Mass calls for thinking beyond individuals. A social perspective is essential.”

Fr Bob acknowledges the temptation to despair but his mantra of “it’s better to light one candle than to curse the darkness” helps him to see it as another “revival” moment in the life of the Church.

“My main point of the book, what encourages and preoccupies me, is the urgency of a global youth movement around ecology, the whole Catholic contribution to ecology and ecology’s contribution to the Church,” he said.

“I really think it’s on the scale of Catholic education, what Catholic schools were at the time of Mary MacKillop.

“A global youth movement to help save the planet is the crucial thing facing everybody.”

Fr Wilkinson at home in North Plympton.

He stresses that it’s more than being ‘green’.

“At the centre of every green issue is the human issue and I think that’s where the Church is vital,” he explained.

“I think the great model for this is the Good Samaritan…the priests and the Levite on the way to the temple missed a half-dead man…I think we’ve got a half-dead planet and we are called to be the Good Samaritan.

While the global YCW movement had its roots in the neglected working class of Europe, Fr Bob said this became more of a symbol than a key element of the “vigorous youth movement” in Australia.

“What YCW communicated most was Cardijn’s truth of faith that every person is special to God, with a contribution to give,” he said.

“Shining the light on people’s lives was the key thing – work, home and leisure. The young factory workers were a precious resource, a treasure of society and Church, not a problem. Like the 19 out of 20 young people not going to church in Australia.

“The Church has been presented to young people as an inward-looking organisation that does some outside good.

“The fact is that our destiny is inseparable to the destiny of those around us. This hasn’t been stressed enough. Once you see that the struggle is for humanity and our common home, questions of the Church will sort themselves out.”

This inextricable connection with the world mirrors his own “progress in the priesthood”.

“I used to see the work of the priest as helping Catholics to live their lives to get to heaven, to put it crudely,” he said.

“The rest of the world was thought of as a quarry to make Catholics out of. I very much now see the Church as standing with the world and having a vital contribution to make.

“The role of the priest is to animate people to take their part in that struggle.

“Cardijn didn’t start from massive action, he always started with ‘who are you and how are you’ at the factory gate, that interest in the life of people.”

Other topics covered in the book include the fallout from the Church’s position on birth control, the impact of Vatican II on the laity, the Vietnam War and Basic Ecclesial Communities.

While it is not a biography, there are fascinating insights into Fr Bob’s early life growing up in foster care after his parents broke up, meeting his father for the first time just hours before his death.

New Visions of Priesting, an interview with Bob Wilkinson is available from ATF Press (www.atfpress.com) for $24.95.

SOURCE

Jenny Brinkworth, Time for another global youth movemehttps://thesoutherncross.org.au/news/2022/12/15/time-for-another-global-youth-movement/nt (Southern Cross)

BUY THE BOOK

Bob Wilkinson, New Visions of Priesting (ATF Press)

Jean Boulier’s “I was a Red Priest” and the Holocaust

BOOK REVIEW:

In 1977 Father Jean Boulier (1894-1980), a French priest, wrote an autobiography, J’étais un prêtre rouge. Like his American Catholic contemporary, Dorothy Day (1897-1980), he was on the left. And like Day, who is being made a “saint” by Rome, Fr Boulier is in a similar process, but it is Israel (Yad Vashem) that is considering conferring its equivalent honor, “Righteous among the Nations.”

As part of honoring Fr Boulier, an English translation of his autobiography, I was a Red Priest, is now being published. As a red priest, his book described his dealings with the French Communist Party (PCF), priest workers, Eastern Europe, the post-war peace movement, Vatican II, Jesuits, Thomism, liberation theology, liturgy, ecumenism, mysticism and the church hierarchy. His thinking and actions paralleled those of his American counterpart Day, as did the reaction of the civil and religious authorities.

It was his politics in World War II, however, which were on the side of the Jews and against the Nazi and Vichy government that both endeared him to Israel and pushed him permanently into the communist camp. As his book summarised, in 1938 he was appointed to be the pastor of Sainte-Devote Parish in Monaco. In June 1940, France fell to the Nazis and the independent principality of Monaco followed France.

READ MORE

Toby Terrar, An Autobiography of A Red Priest During World War II (Social Policy)

READ THE BOOK

Jean Boulier, I was a red priest (CW Publishers)

Jocist Women Leaders Seminar, Leuven

Featuring speakers from Belgium, France, the UK, Uruguay, Australia and the US and hosted by the Catholic Documentation Centre (KADOC) and the Catholic University of Leuven (KU Leuven), the Jocist Women Leaders Seminar took place at Leuven, Belgium on 27-28 October 2022.

Reflecting the range of papers presented, the theme of the workshop was “To make daily life vast and beautiful: Jocist Women Leaders.”

Women leaders highlighted included Marguerite Fiévez, a key figure in the development of the International YCW and a close collaborator of Cardijn, trade union pioneer, Victoire Cappe, and Malaysian YCW leader, Irene Fernandez.

The workshop understood the term “jocist” in its broad sense, including not just those from a JOC (YCW) background but from the various lay apostolate/Specialised Catholic Action movements, including the YCS (JEC), JIC (Young professionals), JAC (young farmers) and others.

It is planned to publish select papers in an academic journal.

In another major initiative, an online biographical dictionary of jocist women leaders will be developed.

Immense thanks to the various project sponsors: American Academy of Religion; University of Divinity, Melbourne; King’s College, London; KADOC – KU Leuven; Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies; Dondeynefonds, KU Leuven; LACIIR  (Latin American and the Caribbean  Interdisciplinary Initiative on  Religion),  Florida International University, Miami, Fl, USA; Australian Cardijn Institute, Australia.

READ MORE

Seminar Papers (Jocist Women Leaders Project)

Jean Tyacke, unionist and YCW extension worker in South Africa

Jean Tyacke, who came to South Africa from her native United States as a YCW extension worker, has died in Johannesburg, just a few days before her 95th birthday.

“She might have been the last of the giant Young Christian Workers-trained unionists active in the apartheid era,” writes Paul Goller in the South African Southern Cross magazine.

Jean was born in the United States in 1927 and came to South Africa in 1959. Engagingly she retained her accent over the rest of her life. But, more characteristically, she continued her voting for Democratic presidential candidates up to Joe Biden.

In Chicago, probably her favourite city, Jean came to YCW early, after having been very active in Young Christian Students In her schooldays. Even then, she said, she saw herself more as a teambuilder than as a dominant leader; the apartheid regime came to dislike both.

In 1961, Jean married Eric Tyacke, founder of the South African branch of YCW in 1949 and the Urban Training Project (UTP). They lived in Robertsham until their retirement in 1987. The non-racial parties they hosted were surely the scandal of the neighbourhood. They didn’t, one suspects, make their children’s lives at the local government school any easier.

With journalist Sydney Duval and others, Jean participated in the drafting of the SACBC’s seminal 1972 pastoral letter condemning apartheid, “Call to Conscience”, and its subsequent study materials.

She also took part in the launch of the YCS adult Family Social Action movement.

Jean’s home was raided by the security police as early as the late 1960s; the Anglican dean of Johannesburg had been charged with participating in an alleged African National Congress plan to overthrow the government by force. Jean’s YCW heritage, building on her Catholic Christian faith, would not have let her fall into that trap.

From 1976, for more than three years the Tyacke family lived under the full rigours of the banning system, which attempted to destroy most aspects of its victims’ work, social and activist lives. Percy Qoboza, the YCW editor of The World wrote of Jean and Eric: ”Take heart, you two beautiful people: you do everything possible to bridge the growing gap between black and white”.

Jean worked at Wits University — after the employment element of her banning was challenged — and into the 1980s. She was able to see the education of her daughters Kathy, Teresa and Sheila continue into socially committed professions at Wits during this period.

Jean was employed at UTP only intermittently; but in 1999 the late Donovan Lowry found her help invaluable, not only in proofreading his authoritative history of UTP but also in adding to and even shaping his research material.

Eric Tyacke died on August 20, 2014, at 89.

In a letter to Eric and Jean on their retirement in 1987, Archbishop Denis Hurley of Durban had summed up their working lives: “What a contribution you both have made in the building up of the worker movement in South Africa. You, and some others like you, have with great dedication, maintained links between organised Church and the worker. Thank you and God bless you for that.”

Reuben Denge, the director of WEP, the organisation that succeeded UTP, said upon hearing of Jean’s death: ”She really contributed immensely in the development of the labour movement in South Africa.”

SOURCE

Catholic activist Jean Tyacke dies at 94 (Southern Cross)

Book: To Jurong with Love

Former Singapore YCS and YCW leader, Tang Lay Lee, has published a history of the Singapore YCW entitled “To Jurong with love.”

She traces the history of the movement from its beginnings in 1954-55 by French Foreign Mission priests Frs Hippolyte Berthold and Louis Amiotte-Suchet in the parish of Saints Peter and Paul to its ultimate end in 1998.

In a chapter entitles “From parish to periphery,” Lay Lee explains the YCW’s transition from a parish-based movement to one that focused its work in Singapore’s then strongly developing industrial area of Jurong in the west of the island.

Her choice of the word “periphery” is perhaps highly significant because while the word echoes Pope Francis’ call for the Church to move to the peripheries of society, it also echoes the way in which the YCW itself became somewhat marginalised by the Church.

Worse, during the 1980s, the YCW’s work became the subject of accusations of communism and Marxism by the nation’s rulers, leading in 1987 to the arrest of many Church workers, including Lay Lee herself.

Moreover, it is no accident that these arrests took place just a year after the toppling of the Marcos regime in the neighbouring Philippines, events in which the Catholic Church as well as many grassroots Catholics played a large role.

The book also gently gives rise to questions about the strategy of moving from parish to periphery? Was this a success? Was the change too abrupt? Would it have been possible to maintain parish YCW groups while developing the new outreach to industrial areas?

In fact, the YCW in many other countries, particularly in Asia, followed a similar trajectory that of the Singapore YCW. Few have been able to maintain the movement in this manner. There is much to ponder from this experience.

‘To Jurong with Love’ concludes with a chapter of reminiscences and testimonies from YCW leaders of various generations.

Their sentiments are well summed up in the moving poem that introduces that chapter and which gave the book its title.

Although it concludes with the end of the movement in 1998, there is much to learn from Lay Lee’s excellent and heartfelt history as well as great inspiration for a new foundation.

Stefan Gigacz

To Jurong With Love

The roads to Jurong from everywhere were tough, decade after decade.

We went with our different backgrounds and quests, we met as strangers,

we became friends through YCW at work, at the Centre.

We left Jurong for the world, forever changed by all that we experienced and understood

of the working and living conditions confronting workers, day in day out.

We left Jurong for the world with new eyes, by the grace of God

heartened by the solidarity with one another as human beings,

This is from each one of us and all of us with YCW-

To Jurong With Love.

BUY THE BOOK

Tang Lay Lee, To Jurong with Love (Kinokinuya)

Russ Tershy: YCW and Peace Corps pioneer

Russell Joseph Tershy passed away on 29 June 2022, marking a century that began before the Great Depression and continued into the Internet age.

Russell Tershy believed in every person’s potential, and he believed that luck and circumstances, not ability, shaped people’s trajectories. He understood this first-hand. Tershy, born in Enid, Oklahoma, fled the Dust Bowl to California with his family in a Model-T Ford in the 1920s. He, his four siblings and his parents, Lebanese immigrants who opened a successful general store on the High Plains, lost everything and became migrant farm workers. They picked peaches in southern California, and through the generosity of a man who rented them a plot of land and a chicken barn in Robla, California but never collected full rent, the Tershy family emerged from financial ruin. They converted the barn into a home with a wood stove and an outhouse, and Russell helped grow and sell fruits and vegetables door-to-door. They started buying fruit from other farmers and reselling it to stores. By age 15 Russell was driving a truck full of fruit back and forth from Robla to Los Angeles and negotiating sales and purchases. Kindness extended was their luck.

Education was an engine of upward mobility for Tershy, as it was for so many Americans. He attended the one-room Robla Elementary school and New Deal era progressive Grant High School which sparked a lifelong commitment to education. His valedictorian speech was about the role of education in building a prosperous future. He attended Sacramento City College, the first member of his family to attend college. When World War II started, he left college to fight facism with the US Calvary. He was stationed on a cold, remote island off Washington State, but after his basic training IQ test was finally processed, he was sent to Stanford University where he spent two years studying Chinese language and culture, mule packing and survival in preparation to be parachuted with a mule into China to aid the resistance to Japanese occupation.

Much to his surprise, he was shipped off to the Philippines where he was retrained as a radio operator and undertook countless patrol missions searching for Japanese soldiers in areas transitioning from Japanese to US control. Next he was on a ship bound for the invasion of Japan and was then among the first groups of soldiers to land in the country after the Japanese surrender.

When he returned from the war after five years overseas, he visited his parents, sister and baby nephew in Robla. They then drove to San Francisco to visit two of his sisters, while his mother stayed behind with the baby. When he returned a few days later, no one answered the door. He climbed in through a window and found his mother dead, his baby nephew asleep in the cradle.

The family was convinced that his mother would have been alive had they been able to afford good medical care. Russell poured his grief into making money. With his father he rented and ran a residence hotel on Polk St in San Francisco. Within a few years they were making over $US300,000/yr in today’s dollars, and Russell was living the life in San Francisco.

His family was finally financially secure, but he lingered on his mother’s early death, the devastation of war he witnessed in Japan and the Philippines, and his family’s stint as entrapped migrant farmworkers, which they escaped with the help of the man who never asked for the full rent. He turned over the hotel business to his family and joined the Young Christian Workers, making less than $US6,000/yr in today’s dollars as a labor union organizer and poverty fighter.

He considered becoming a Catholic priest, got engaged, called it off and reconsidered priesthood before meeting his wife, Ellie Marie Sheridan, in the Young Christian Workers movement. They married in 1960 when they were both 39. Their son Bernie was born the following year, and Russell was recruited by the newly formed Peace Corps to be the Deputy Director for Bolivia. The new family lived in Bolivia for four years until one of Bolivia’s frequent coups forced the Peace Corps program out.

They returned to the US where Russell, thanks to the GI Bill and Stanford’s generous re-admission policy, resumed his college education after a ~20 year pause. His plan was to return to poverty fighting in Latin America armed with a new degree, but they decided to stay in the US when his 2nd son, Bill, almost died shortly after birth and was saved by the state-of-the-art medical care available at Stanford.

Russ Tershy

With renewed focus on poverty in the US, Russell co-founded the Center for Employment Training, a non-profit job training program. Their first office was a small outbuilding behind Our Lady of Guadalupe Church in San Jose, CA, which he shared with Cesar Chavez and the nascent United Farm Workers movement. The bond and close working relationship between the two organizations continues to this day. The Center for Employment training model was to accept all applicants, have them enter the training pipeline at whatever stage matched their level, and have them remain in the program until they were placed in a permanent job with a working-class, living wage. Independent research proved this to be the most effective job training model in the US. The San Jose Center for Employment training was replicated across the country and directly lifted over 200,000 families out of poverty and into the working and middle class. Its model became standard best practice for job training around the world.

After retiring from the Center for Employment Training, Russell, with his wife Ellie, his son Bill’s family and his nephew Joe Tershay, started the Montessori Community School in Scotts Valley.

Russell passed away at the home he shared with his wife Ellie (99 YO) and his son Bill & family. He was surrounded by family and friends. He was the oldest surviving World War II veteran in Santa Cruz County.

He is survived by his wife Ellie, son Bernie, his wife Erika Zavaleta and children Raven, Finn, Russell & Navia Terhy; and son Bill and his wife Regina Tershy their children and grandchild.

Rosary Friday 15 July, 7pm, son Bill’s home- call 831.246.3463 for address & directions

Funeral Mass 16 July, open casket 930-1030am, mass 1030am, St. Joseph’s Catholic Church, 435 Monterey Ave, Capitola, CA 95010

Followed by memorial celebration Bill’s home- call 831.246.3463 for address & directions

Burial 18 July, 11am, Central Coast Vets Cemetery, 2900 Parker Flats Cut Off Rd, Seaside, CA 93955

SOURCE

Russell Joseph Tershy (1921-2022) (Legacy)

50th Anniversary (Center for Employment Training)

Webinar: A priest for workers

Former South African YCW chaplain, Fr Joe Falkiner op, will be our speaker for our next ACI Webinar entitled “A Priest for Workers” on Tuesday 12 July 2022 at 7pm AEST.

Last year, Fr Joe published his memoirs in a book of the same name in which he recalled his many years of work as chaplain of the South African YCW movement under the apartheid regime during the 1970s and 180s.

SPEAKER

South African Dominican priest, Fr Joe Falkiner op, was born in the town of Springs in 1934. After completing high school with the Christian Brothers, he studied geology at university.

After this, he began work with the Anglo-American Corporation mining conglomerate, which sent him to Tanganyika (now Tanzania). Through this work, he saw the terrible way in which black workers were treated by their employer, eventually leading to his resignation and search for his vocation.

In 1962, he applied to enter the Dominican Order, joining their community at Stellenbosch in 1963, leading to his ordination in 1969.

Soon after joining the Dominicans, he came into contact with local teams of the South African YCW. As a priest in a parish from 1970, he began a greater involvement with the movement, setting him on the path to eventually becoming national chaplain.

Fr Joe’s memoirs tell the story of this sometimes dangerous work, under the surveillance of the security police, at the height of the apartheid regime.

READ MORE

Gunther Simmermacher, Book review: A priest looks back (Australian Cardijn Institute)

BUY THE BOOK

A Priest for Workers: Memoirs of Father Joseph Falkiner OP (Cluster Publications)

WEBINAR DETAILS

Title: A Priest for Workers: Fr Joe Falkiner op on working with the YCW in South Africa under apartheid

Date: Tuesday 12 July 2022, 7pm AEST/11am South African time

REGISTER

https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZwpdeGtpz8jHdAr1XEZRtwQcBtAX55ixaYb

Charles de Foucauld canonised

On 15 May 2022, Pope Francis canonised French mystic, Charles de Foucauld, a former soldier who lived in the North African desert for many years devoting his life to the Indigenous Taureg peoples.

Today, Charles de Foucauld is regarded as a pioneer of interreligious dialogue, witnessing to his faith through his quiet example, without words, living it out through deep prayer and friendship and service to the people he came to know.

Pope Francis also referred to the example of Charles de Foucauld in his 2020 encyclical, Fratelli Tutti:

Yet I would like to conclude by mentioning another person of deep faith who, drawing upon his intense experience of God, made a journey of transformation towards feeling a brother to all. I am speaking of Blessed Charles de Foucauld. Blessed Charles directed his ideal of total surrender to God towards an identification with the poor, abandoned in the depths of the African desert. In that setting, he expressed his desire to feel himself a brother to every human being, and asked a friend to “pray to God that I truly be the brother of all”. He wanted to be, in the end, “the universal brother”. Yet only by identifying with the least did he come at last to be the brother of all. May God inspire that dream in each one of us. Amen. (Fratelli tutti, 286-287)

Charles de Foucauld was a major source of inspiration for many early Jocist chaplains and leaders, including French priest, René Voillaume, founder of the Little Brothers of Jesus and the Little Brothers of the Gospel.

In Belgium, the Little Sisters of Nazareth based their own charism on that of both Charles de Foucauld and Joseph Cardijn.

READ MORE

De Foucauld: Total surrender to God and universal fraternity (Vatican News)

Biography of Charles de Foucauld (Spiritual Family Charles de Foucauld)

René Voillaume (Wikipedia)

Little Sisters of Nazareth (The Deipara Initiative)

Remembering Fr Hugh O’Sullivan: 25th anniversary

The Australian YCW together with ACI, the Cardijn Community and YCW Holdings will commemorate the 25th anniversary of the death of Fr Hugh O’Sullivan with a commemorative dinner on Saturday 28 May at 5pm and mass on Sunday 29 May at 2pm at The Monastery, 15 Cross Road, Glen Osmond, SA.

Fr Hugh (1939 -1997) was best remembered as Chaplain of the Australian YCW and also served with the international team in Asia Pacific, based in Hong Kong.

From his first parish appointment until his passing, he used his ability to relate easily to people of all ages, coupled with his profound grasp of the mission of the YCW and was able to wear so easily the two hats that adorned him: essentially faithful to the traditions of the Church, he did not balk at social agitation when it was needed.

His book ‘The Clatter of Wooden Clogs’ on the dignity of work was the fruit of his lifetime reflections on justice and continues to be used today in AYCW for the formation of leaders and mentors alike.

The event is being jointly organized by Australian Young Christian Workers Movement, Australian Cardijn Institute, Cardijn Community Australia and YCW Holdings.

“As part of the AYCW’s National Action Conference being held in Adelaide, let’s come together to listen to stories from those who worked closely with Hugh, commemorate his life and action and celebrate his ongoing legacy,” writes Adelaide YCW worker, Ashish Chaulagain.

BOOK YOUR TICKETS HERE

Cost: $55 per head (2 course meal)A bar will be available

Please RSVP as numbers are limited.To RSVP or for more details, please contact Ashish at 0449913292 or ashish.chaulagain@ycw.org.au

Bank Account Details:
Account Name: Australian Young Christian Workers
Account BSB: 062-443
Account Number: 13093106
Description: Fr Hugh Your Name and Number

READ MORE ABOUT FR HUGH

www.hughosullivan.com

HUGH’S WRITINGS

Notes for Leaders

Making Monday the Best Day of the Week

Tipping the world on its head

In this article, Kevin Peoples recalls his YCW experience.

My Auntie Poll asked me once what the YCW was. Polly lived with us on and off in the 1950s. She spoke with an Irish brogue, which rubbed off on me. Her question was prompted because I had started my own YCW team. The rag-tag team, made in the image of God, came in the back door at home and sheepishly made their way to the front room, which was only used when we had visitors. Up in the front room I lit a candle, we read the gospel and talked about our lives. Serious talk. Without knowing much what happened behind the door, Polly thought it all looked strange behaviour for young men. It was difficult to know where to start when she asked me the question.

Polly listened with growing scepticism as I explained the YCW. When I told her I was Christ in the world that was too much. She raised her eyes to heaven and whispered, ‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph’. Looking at me straight in the eye she told me gravely that the YCW was not only dangerous, but a distinct threat to my health and mental state and if I had any brains I would leave all that stuff to the priests. She was of course half right. The YCW was dangerous.

I joined the YCW in my late teens following a visit by the Ballarat Diocesan full-time YCW worker, Jim Ross. This was around the mid-1950s. Jim spoke to a small group of leaders of the then Catholic Young Men’s Club (CYMS) in Terang. I listened intently but I was not convinced we should move from the CYMS to the YCW. That changed when I spoke to Jim on the way out. I asked him where he was sleeping that night. He said ‘I don’t know’. I asked him where he slept the previous night. He said, ‘On the beach at Warrnambool’. I joined the YCW at that moment and it transformed my life.

I joined the YCW because of my heart not my head. My transformation took a little longer. My understanding of being a Catholic changed dramatically. My allegiance to Catholicism came from the set of beliefs I had grown into from my schooling, my parents and the preaching I heard each Sunday at Mass. I had the knowledge but it didn’t eat into me. My purpose in life, in that old, narrow dispensation was to save my soul and spend eternity in Heaven with my God who lived somewhere outside the world. My real world in Terang was a mere backdrop to my eternal salvation; in the same way as an artist paints a backdrop for a stage play. An artefact to brighten the surroundings. In the new dispensation, my religion was horizontal, encompassing all and everything about me. I was in the process of becoming something new.

The YCW tipped the old on its head. I was to become a lay apostle in the world. Christ was present in me and in each young worker – Catholic and non-Catholic. I was called to love all young workers and work for them in practical ways that would gradually bring about the Kingdom that Jesus emphasised in his mission. That Kingdom is in the here and now. Jesus had come to offer a new social order based on love and justice and not just finding a way to Heaven. This Heaven in the sky gradually slipped out of my thinking. However small my efforts might be in Terang, I came to realise that I had a vocation to help create this Kingdom that would be sharply at odds with all earthly Kingdoms and earthly institutions. I started to grow from the inside.

Father John Molony, our Diocesan Chaplain, told us leaders, to my surprise, that we all had a Divine Origin, a Divine Mission and a Divine Destiny. I puzzled over that. We were, he said, all sharers in the Divine life of Christ and in our small world we were irreplaceable. All this was to change my sense of who I was, my very identity. Molony told us that the building of the Kingdom of God in the here was dependant on us. What this meant for me was that the secular world had become sacred. There could be no dualism between this world and the next. In the YCW I had come from being virtually a no one to being someone very special. It did wonders for my self-belief. I came to believe I could do anything.

I learnt that my apostolate was not some narrow thing such as getting young workers back to Mass. Not religious in that sense, in a Church sense, but a total apostolate that included a broad social, economic and political apostolate, but not party political. I belonged to an international movement that was committed to change especially in the workplace. Our broad apostolate was exercised through individual members like me in local groups, but also through our representatives at a national level. Campaigns were planned for local groups on issues critically important for young workers.

Over a nine year cycle in the 1950s three broad themes were identified: family, work and leisure. These themes were repeated every three years. At our local leaders’ group meetings we followed a clear agenda in programs geared to local action. We had our own ‘Items of Interest’ and ‘Facts of Action’. We followed an action/reflection model. We were to learn through acting. We grew through acting. And the driver of our action was the contradiction we saw between what was and what could be. We had a vision. Our Gospel discussions provided the ‘what could be’ and our ‘enquiry method’, (what we observed) provided the ‘what was’ or the hard facts. All of this was experiential learning. If we didn’t personally experience the contradictions between the real and the ideal, between the world and the Kingdom then action was unlikely to occur. The genius who worked out this enquiry method, or See, Judge and Act, was Joseph Cardijn (1882-1967), the Belgian priest who witnessed the suffering of young workers in the industrial areas of his city.

———

What follows is an outline of how the YCW influenced me in two major events of my early adult life. The first was my time as an organiser for B.A. Santamaria’s ‘National Catholic Rural Movement’ (1959-1961). As a young leader in the small town of Terang I was groomed by a couple, Pat and Maureen Bourke, who were executive members of the National Catholic Rural Movement (NCRM) and local leaders of Santamaria’s anti-Communist Movement, eventually named the National Civic Council (NCC). The YCW had made me restless for something more in life. I left my clerical work and began working on the Bourke farm – no pay but free board and lodging – for three months while Pat campaigned for the Democratic Labor Party (DLP). At the end of that time, through the influence of Pat and Maureen, Santamaria agreed to employ me for a three month’s trial without a salary but all expenses paid. I was to collect money from the farming members of the NCRM. Santamaria was cautious. I had a YCW background and relationships between Santamaria and the YCW in Melbourne were icy cold.

With my 203 Peugeot and my inner voice telling me I could walk on water, I became an outstanding salesmen for Santamaria’s NCRM. I quickly resurrected the financial fortunes of the NCRM and became full time with a new powder-blue Holden. Unbelievably, I was appointed the National Organising Secretary of a Catholic Action Movement with a national mandate from the bishops. It was all nonsense, mere window dressing and I learnt quickly that the NCRM was virtually dead and useful only as a front for anti-communism in rural areas. Naturally, I wanted to change it into an adult YCW. I knew what a Catholic Action movement should look like and I found a small minority of members in the North-East of Victoria who also wanted to change the NCRM into a genuine Catholic Action Movement. That meant breaking its links with Santamaria and his anti-communist actions within the Labor Movement.

Some history is required here. In 1954, when Dr H.V. Evatt, leader of the Australian Labor Party, revealed to surprised Australians the existence of a secret movement led by a Mr B.A. Santamaria working within the Labor Movement, funded and supported by the Catholic bishops and owing allegiance to the Church, all hell broke loose. The Labor Pary split and the Conservatives ruled for the next 22 years with the support of the Democratic Labor Party (DLP) preferences or Catholic preferences. Cardinal Norman Gilroy, (Sydney) requested Rome to make a ruling on the existence of such a secret organisation working with a political party. In 1957 Rome ruled against Santamaria. In 1960 in Warrnambool, I listened as Santamaria belatedly resigned as National Secretary of the NCRM and Bishop Francis Henschke announced his replacement, Mr. W.E. (Bill) Crowe, who had worked for Santamaria and the secret movement since the mid-1940s. Nothing had changed.

But I saw an opportunity. The appointment of Crowe caused deep divisions within sections of the NCRM. The Executive had not been consulted. I built on the divisions which had been there long before I arrived. I convinced Maureen Bourke that the NCRM should adopt the Cardijn method and become a genuine Catholic Action Movement. I spoke with some chaplains and other members about the possibility of a new sort of NCRM. I convinced Bill Crowe that he was the National Secretary of an organisation that was virtually dead. Bill knew it and I think his pride led him to approach Santamaria. The proposed National Conference for 1961 was cancelled and the Executive agreed to a three day meeting to discuss the future of the NCRM. Santamaria agreed but for all the wrong reasons. He would learn who was with him and who was against. I suggested to Crowe that we invite Father John Molony from Ballarat as the keynote speaker on the nature of Catholic Action. Santamaria cultivated Molony from his days as a student and then as a priest in Rome and the United States. Santamaria knew that Molony supported his anti-communist activities and agreed that he could speak. On behalf of Crowe, I spoke with Molony and he too agreed but only after he met my friends, Pat and Maureen Bourke, who convinced him change within the NCRM was possible.

I was a dreamer, a naïve optimist. I didn’t know with whom I was dealing. Santamaria was devious. And he didn’t believe in Molony’s Catholic Action. He thought it ineffective. He was never going to hand over the NCRM to those who wanted to split it from him. It was his baby which he created aged 22 in 1939. I thought I was dealing with people who wanted the best for the NCRM. But there was another agonising irony. John Molony didn’t believe in the NCRM either. Neither did his close friend, Jim Ross, who had brought me into the YCW. Molony and Ross were starting their own YCW Adult Movement in the Ballarat Diocese and their bishop, James O’Collins, had given them a mandate, but, importantly, limited to the diocese. They saw an opportunity to capture then terminate the NCRM and gain its national mandate. They didn’t tell me.

Weeks later, Molony asked me to drive him to Melbourne. He wanted to meet with Santamaria before giving his keynote address. Molony was an honest man Deceiving Santamaria was not in his nature. The poor man told Santamaria of his plans to terminate the NCRM. Santamaria had already heard whispers from his spies in Ballarat about Molony’s plan. Molony sought Santamaria’s better angels — support the development of a genuine adult Catholic Action Movement. It was foolhardy. Promises were made and not kept. Molony left his meeting believing Santamaria would remain neutral at the conference. It was agreed Santamaria would speak first and introduce Molony as a friend. Molony could then put his proposition to the members at an appropriate time. The members would decide their future. Stay with Santamaria or join with Ballarat in the formation of a new Adult Movement based on the principles of Catholic Action. Rural Movement groups in the Ballarat Diocese would be serviced by Ballarat. Nothing like that happened. Molony found himself at the last minute speaking first. He spoke on the nature of Catholic Action. He made no mention of the NCRM. His speech was left hanging out to dry. Irrelevant to the main game. The atmosphere was cool, then cold, then over the three days hostile to Ballarat. Santamaria had planned it so. He fought to keep control of the NCRM emphasising the ineffectiveness of Catholic Action. The YCW, he argued, had no social apostolate. He wished Ballarat well in its ‘experiment’ and hypocritically invited Molony to return to the next conference and report to members.

Ballarat was lost, the NCRM was lost and so was I. In a sense I had innocently brought this mayhem about. Because I believed in Cardijn. Because I was YCW. Because I knew what Catholic Action was. But I discovered I was playing with fire. Before the end of the conference I was asked to speak. I had nothing to say so I resigned. Santamaria accepted and said I would be happier with Molony in Ballarat. When Molony went to say good bye to Santamaria he told the priest to ‘go to buggery’. When Maureen Bourke went to say good bye, he told her to ‘go to hell’.

Molony invited me to Ballarat to join his Diocesan adult movement. I became a window cleaner. At my first meeting, a dejected Molony quietly announced that the bishop had withdrawn his mandate. Santamaria was never going to accept an Adult Movement competing with the NCC and the NCRM. The adult movement was dead. Molony never really recovered. He left the priesthood a year and a half later. (These events are told in detail in my book ‘Santamaria’s Salesman’, (2012) Garratt Publishing, Mulgrave. They still have a small number of copies left).

——–

The second major event in my young life where the YCW determined my actions was the decision to leave my studies for the priesthood. After two years back at Chevalier Secondary College in Bowral, New South Wales, I entered St Columba’s Seminary in the Blue Mountains in 1964. I left towards the end of 1966 following nearly three years of philosophy.

In the seminary I met an alien god. My seminary god was gender specific. A male chauvinistic and judgmental god, he was at once cold, distant and aloof. This god lived somewhere above the clouds and his truths were handed down to my superiors. This god enveloped me not in his love but in his rules and I demonstrated my love for him when I obeyed his rules. This patriarchal and misogninistic god looked down from Heaven and found women lacking. We were not permitted to speak to the nine women who cooked and cleaned for us. Celibacy was never mentioned.

I learn that I had not chosen to be here but this seminary god had chosen me and I was thus deemed ‘special’. I was trapped. How could I leave when I had been chosen? This god was the opposite of my YCW God. The clerical mission worried me greatly. The Church taught that God directly created souls and souls were the business of the church and its priests. And the salvation of souls was intimately connected to notions of sin, forgiveness and our true happiness in Heaven. The clerical caste worked as shepherds. Thy guided and protected their flocks from the evils and errors of the world and forgave their sins when they faulted. I was a restless shepherd. Rather than protecting people from the world I wanted to save the world. I wanted to help bring about the Kingdom that was central to the teaching of Jesus. Ths Kingdom was the reign of God here on Earth. In the YCW we saw it the transformation of earthly life and a continuation of the work begun by Jesus. Its constitutive elements were built on love and justice. At heart, I was a layman, not a saver of disembodied souls seeking happiness in Heaven.

I came to the conclusion that the seminary existed to weed people out. The only change permitted was in the number of students. This seminary system was four hundred years old. The favoured philosopher of the Vatican died in 1274. I could not walk alone with a friend. I was not permitted to enter another student’s room. I could smell the fear of gay sex. When I sang in concerts I was forced to change the lyrics if authorities thought them ‘inappropriate’. I was in danger of becoming something I wasn’t. The seminary drew me into myself and made me smaller. The YCW drew me out of myself and made me bigger.

God cannot be gender specific. But I learnt in the seminary that my God was more female than male. That I was a mix of male and female. My female God was sweet and warm and she loved the world that she had begun and all the people who were created in her image. When I hung white, feminine curtains in my small room I was asked to take them down. Real men play rugby. They don’t fly white curtains in the wind. My God lived in the real world where the secular and the sacred were one. When I left my family and relatives in Terang to return on the morning train to the seminary, I saw my God. She was real and I could see her. She stood in vegetable gardens and waved me good bye. She stood in the middle of the road with tears in her eyes because I was leaving her. She was my mother. Sometimes my God stood in the middle of the road wearing a pink dressing gown, and made me hot curries when I came home for Christmas. She was my Auntie. My God was calm and gentle. She had gnarled hands from working in the factory. She dressed in blue overalls and when she dressed up she wore a tie and put on a green cardigan. She rubbed the noses of untamed horses and whispered in their ears to calm them. She was my father and she voted for the Labor Party and joined a union.

And so I left the seminary.

Kevin Peoples

Making life beautiful: The Jocist Women Leaders project

Led by Katharine Massam and Stefan Gigacz, ACI’s latest project aims to record the lives and contributions of women jocist leaders from around the world and of every generation.

Few remember today that when Cardijn began his ministry in the parish of Our Lady of Laeken, near Brussels, he started by forming study circles of young female teenage workers. And to achieve this, he recruited several young women with experience in community and labour organising, including Victoire Cappe and Madeleine De Roo.

Entitled “Making daily life vast and beautiful,” the Jocist Women Leaders project will draw on oral and written sources to bring the stories of these women to life.

The international project team includes researchers from Latin America, Europe and Australia. The initial aims will be to publish a book presenting the life and work of ten jocist women leaders and to develop an online database recording the stories of so many more of these powerful women.

“The international conversation is already showing that women held key leadership roles as the movement grew and spread,” Katharine Massam noted. “We’re keen to understand what made that possible, and to recover the memory of those contributions in many different contexts.”

A special website has been launched to host the project.

READ MORE

Jocist Women Leaders Project (Australian Cardijn Institute/Joseph Cardijn Digital Library)

Vale Fr Kevin Mogg AM

Born on 23 April 1932, former YCW chaplain, Fr Kevin Mogg AM died on Saturday 26 February 2000 – just two months shy of his 90th birthday.

Regarded as an inspiring parish leader for over six decades, an educator, and a prison and youth justice chaplain, he founded Catholic Social Services Victoria (CSSV) and was a member of the Australian Catholic Social Justice Council for 15 years.

ACI president and former YCW leader, Brian Lawrence, recalled Fr Kevin’s work with the YCW:

When I was in the YCW in Fawkner in the 1960s, Kevin Mogg was the curate at St Pius’ in West Heidelberg.  He was a legend in what was a very challenging parish, based on the old 1956 Olympic Village, into which the Government moved families from the inner-city slums. It had a very strong parish and a parish YCW well able to serve the youth of a tough neighbourhood.  Its football teams were the most successful across the northern suburbs, at least, and they produced some notable footballers, including the Collingwood great, Peter McKenna. This was a place where football was just not a sporting service, but a connection with the wider community. 

I heard a lot about Kevin Mogg in the 1960s because one of our parish YCW chaplains, Fr Joe McMahon, was a great mate of his. (We had two chaplains, one for the Girls YCW and one for the Boys YCW.)  Joe McMahon died five years ago, a priest of 54 years. His nephew, Fr Joe Caddy, is the Vicar General of the Archdiocese of Melbourne.  Our other chaplain, Fr Don Burnard, left the priesthood and kept the faith. He died in January 2022, aged 90. Joe McMahon and Don Burnard were inspirational, just like Kevin Mogg was in West Heidelberg.

Readers of these newsletters will know that we often write about former YCW chaplains who have died.  Some of them have gone on to higher office and greater responsibilities in the Church, but whether they did or not is beside the point.  These three priests, like dozens of other priests of their generation in and around Melbourne (and many more outside Melbourne) might be called Cardijn or Jocist priests, but, more accurately, they were Vatican II priests. Most of their formation in the seminaries and after ordination was during the Vatican II years. In Melbourne, at least, the emergence of the outward-looking lay apostolate of Vatican II started before Vatican II was called in January 1959 by Pope John XXIII. 

The great success of the YCW in Australia was found in parishes where there were a lot of young workers, from 14 or 15 years though to 20 or, maybe, 21. The young chaplains were able to engage with this group because they were, for the most part, from ordinary, and often large, working class families. It kept them grounded. The decline of the YCW is often put down to sociological factors impacting on young people (especially increased mobility through car ownership, greater entertainment options, and higher school retention rates), but a significant and often overlooked factor is the loss of priests like Kevin Mogg, Joe McMahon and Don Burnard.

CSSV board chairman, Bernie Cronin, remembered Fr Kevin as “a true servant leader” who worked tirelessly towards a better and “encouraged very many others to share a sense of belonging and to take action towards a more just, equitable and compassionate society.”

Don Burnard also died recently
Don Burnard (left) with a parish football team

READ MORE

Vale Fr Kevin Mogg AM (Catholic Social Services Victoria)

John Harms, Almanac Racing – Warrnambool Carnival: Pilgrims’ Progress (The Footy Almanac)

Relationship expert turns 90, and shares his top tip for happy ‘marrying’ (Mayflower)

PHOTOS

Catholic Social Services Victoria

Mayflower

Campion Society webinar: Video

Thanks to Colin Jory and Richard Doig for an excellent webinar on “The Campion Society and the development of the lay apostolate in Australia” on Tuesday 15 February 2022.

Also taking part were eight direct descendants of the original Campions, Karl Schmude, son of Alf, Anne Kelly and Barbara Kelly Cooper, daughters of Kevin T. Kelly, Jacinta Heffey and Marilyn Puglisi, daughters of Gerard Heffey, Tom Knowles son of Bill Knowles, as well as Paul Santamaria and Anne McIlroy, son and daugther of BA Santamaria. Also present was David Moloney, nephew of Des O’Connell.

We thank them all for joining us.

WATCH THE VIDEO

READ MORE

Colin Jory, The Campion Society and the development of the lay apostolate in Australia (Text of talk)

Richard Doig, The National Catholic Rural Movement and a ‘New Deal’ for Australia: the rise and fall of an agrarian movement 1931-1958 (Charles Sturt University)

Campion Society website (Australian Cardijn Institute)

RIP Bartolo Perez, IYCW president and Vatican II lay auditor

Brazilian Bartolo Perez, president of the IYCW from 1961-65 and a lay auditor at Vatican II, died on 21 January 2022 at the age of 96.

Born on 20 November 1925, Bartolo began work as an apprentice turner in a small auto parts factory at the age of fourteen. Here, Bartolo met young Emídio, a YCW leader, who introduced him to the YCW in the Mooca neighbourhood of Sao Paulo.

Soon, he became involved in union action to defend the dignity and improve the working conditions of young workers in his factory.

These actions eventually led to his involvement in preparing Brazil’s 1st National Congress of Young Workers and the 1st National Congress of Domestic Workers.

Elected national president, he also helped launched the YCW in neighbouring Uruguay. In 1957, he attended the International YCW pilgrimage to Rome and First International Council.

Four years later at the Second International Council in Rio de Janeiro in 1961, he was elected IYCW international president, succeeding Romeo Maione.

News article on Bartolo’s election as IYCW president

Working with Cardijn, he advocated on behalf of the IYCW from the beginning of Vatican II in 1962, helping contact and lobby many bishops friendly to the YCW, particularly in Latin America.

In 1964, Pope Paul VI appointed him as a lay auditor to the Council in which capacity he continued to assist in the drafting of the Decree on Lay Apostolate, Apostolicam Actuositatem, and the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the World of Today, Gaudium et Spes.

After completing his term with the IYCW, he returned to Brazil with his wife, Candida, moving to Porto Alegre, where he studied pedagogy and became a vocational teacher.

Upon his retirement, he remained active as a member of an Association of Retired Teachers in Private Schools in the state of Rio Grande do Sul, remaining a fierce defender of the rights of the elderly all his life.

He also remained close to the YCW, editing the Boletín Solidariedade, for former YCW members. He also helped compile a book on the history of the Brazil YCW, Juventude, Trabalho, Vida: uma história de desafios – JOC no Brasil, 1935 a 1985.”

From 1997-2000, he also took part in the IYCW History Project, contributing greatly to the volume on the history of the YCW in the Americas.

Candida predeceased Bartolo, dying on 17 May 2015.

Cardijn, Pat Keegan and Bartolo Perez at Vatican II

REFERENCES

Bartolo Perez: A Chronology of The Life of a YCW Activist Who Remained a YCW Activist All His Life (International YCW)

Street Level Disciple

Recent release “Street-Level Disciple” from Covenant Books author Frank R. Ardito Jr. is an eye-opening account of the author’s public life in civil service, his attempt to spread discipleship in his workplace, and his struggles in fighting racism, violence, and hatred in the city of Chicago.

Frank R. Ardito Jr., a former visitor, vice-president, and president of a national support group for heart disease patients; has completed his new book, “Street-Level Disciple”: a ruminating journey of a man who lives his spirituality. The author invites his readers to join him as he performs his duty as a public servant in the Englewood and West Town Communities and the Upper North region of Chicago. Found within the pages are the people, events, and problems he met along the way while fulfilling his calling.

Frank writes, “One part of my book is about some of the turbulence and unrest in our country in the 60,’s, and 70’s, and my humble attempts to respond to such issues as street gang violence, race discrimination and conflict, poverty, riots and near riots. The issues dominating the news today were also present in that earlier period of unrest in our country. Did black and brown lives matter in the turbulent ’60s and ’70s? How about white lives, did they matter?

“A second part of my book is a challenge to those of us who are people of faith. The world is overflowing with problems, needs, violence, poverty, and more. I see all of this as opportunities, profound opportunities for us to bring our faith beliefs to all the situations we encounter in our daily life. No one of us alone can resolve all these problems, but by trying to bring Christ’s love and presence to our brothers and sisters in our communities and world, we can make a difference. We can help build the kingdom of God on Earth.”

Published by Covenant Books of Murrells Inlet, South Carolina, Frank R. Ardito Jr.’s new book is a purposeful read about a man whose goal is to bring God closer to the people he has encountered as a public servant. The author also uses street-level language to make it more appealing to the masses.

Readers can purchase “Street-Level Disciple” at bookstores everywhere, or online at the Apple iTunes Store, Amazon, or Barnes & Noble.

SOURCE

Covenant Books Media Release

Blessed Stefan Wyszynski, YCW founder in Poland

A founder of the YCW in Poland, the late Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski, was beatified during a ceremony at Warsaw’s Church of Divine Providence on 12 September 2021.

Born in Zuzela, Poland, in 1901, Stefan Wyszynski became a priest for the Diocese of Wlocawek in 1924.

After his ordination he studied canon law and social sciences at the Catholic University of Lublin.

He first encountered the JOC and Cardijn while studying in Rome in 1929-30, which coincided with the first jocist pilgrimage to Rome in September 1929.

After he returned to Wlocawek, in 1932 he founded the Katolickie Stowarzyszenie Mlodziezy Robotniczej – the Young Catholic Workers Association, which followed the principles and methods of Cardijn’s JOC.

The JOC barely existed outside of Belgium, France and one or two other francophone countries by 1930, which makes the Polish JOC one of the earliest in the world to go beyond this zone.

During World War II, he became a chaplain to the Polish resistance fighters against Nazism, risking his life on many occasions.

Pope Pius XII made him bishop of Lublin in 1946 and two years later transferred him to Warsaw.

When Poland became communist in 1948, he sought to reach an accommodation with the government. But the government failed to live up to its promises.

Wyszynski also wrote a well known book on the spirituality of work entitled “Work and the sanctification of daily life,” a title which indicates how close his thought was to that of Cardijn.

St John Paul II regarded Cardinal Wyszynski as a mentor.

SOURCES

Jonathan Luxmoore, Polish Cardinal, Blind Franciscan who Knew Each Other Beatified Together (The Tablet)

Stefan Wyszynski (Joseph Cardijn Digital Library)

Stefan Gigacz, Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski – A founding JOC chaplain (Cardijn Research)

PHOTO

EpiskopatNews / Flickr / CC BY NC SA 2.0

Australian YCW celebrates 80 years

This month marks the 80th anniversary of the formal establishment of the YCW in Melbourne, the first Australian diocese in which the movement was launched with the support of the local bishop.

In fact, some local YCW parish “sections” had been operating since 1939 with some experimental groups even earlier.

Nevertheless, 8 September has traditionally been recognised as the anniversary, a date apparently chosen by chaplain, Fr Frank Lombard, in honour of the birthday of Our Lady.

Six weeks later, the movement was planning for its first rally at Xavier College, Kew, to be held on 26 October 1941, as the Melbourne Advocate reported.

Action was already a feature of the early YCW “sections.”

“In one Melbourne parish, a flourishing section has been built up of young men previously not practical Catholics. The leader saw that it was the menace of dead-end jobs which was demoralising his young comrades,” the Advocate says.

“In another parish, the leaders’ group realised that the majority of young workers were wasting a large part of the money they earned. A savings system was brought into existence.

“Another parish section, seeing that many Catholic boys from the country were coming to Melbourne, and that their Faith was imperilled by living in unsuitable boarding houses, has made the provision of Catholic board and lodging one of its activities.

“In another parish, six leaders, who are now determined and enthusiastic apostles, were once boys who did not even go to Mass. If you ask them why the movement won their allegiance – they will tell you that it is precisely because the movement, when it sees a need of the young worker, DOES something about it.

The Young Christian Workers of Melbourne run the biggest football competition in Victoria. Their “learn to dance” classes answer a real need of young Australians. That in a Catholic atmosphere.”

Since then the Australian movement has continued to form thousands of young worker leaders across the country.

SOURCE

YCW Demonstration, October 26 (The Advocate) (Trove)

Righteous of the Nations

Re-enactment of the roundup

The Yad Vashem World Holocaust Remembrance Centre has recognised four Belgian JOC leaders and a chaplain as “Righteous of the Nations” for the roles in protecting and saving Jews and resisting the Nazi occupation during World War II, reports German YCW leader, Florian Schneider, who is researching these issues.

The five people were Herman Bouton, Henri André, Joseph Pesser, Lucien Defauw and Jesuit Fr Pierre Cappart.

The group worked together to conceal Jewish children at various JOC centres, particularly one that was established in the Schaltin castle. At Schaltin, which was managed by Fr Cappart, they  concealed 54 Jewish boys and four women, providing them with forged ID cards.

The women were employed as cooks in the JOC centres, which were established by the Belgian JOC under the leadership of Cardijn and the president, Victor Michel.

The centre also provided assistance to JOC leaders who resisted the German Compulsory Labour Service (Service du Travail Obligatoire or STO) system.

André, Pesser and Defauw were eventually arrested following a roundup at Namur in August 1944 and sent to concentration camps along with several Jewish young men.

After his arrest, Henri André, 22, was sent to the Buchenwald concentration camp, and finally transferred to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp where he died at the end of April 1945.

Joseph Pesser, alias Joseph Legrand, was also sent to Buchenwald and later to the Blankenburg concentration camp. He survived and was repatriated in July 1945 via Sweden.

Lucien Defauw was the manager of a JOC centre at the Schaltin Castle. When arrested, he refused to divulge the presence of the Jewish children. He was also imprisoned in Namur and then interned in the Buchenwald concentration camp, then in the Blankenburg concentration camp. He was repatriated in July 1945 via Sweden.

Last year, the Schaltin Institute commemorated the roundup with a re-enactment and a special service of remembrance.

READ MORE

Commémoration des 75 ans de l’institut de Schaltin et de la rafle d’août 44 ce week-end (Sud Info Ciney Blogs)

 

Des Tobin: Writer, speaker, YCW fulltimer

Des Tobin

Born in 1938, Des Tobin says he’s crammed more lives into his 82 years “than your average cat.” He has variously been a failed student, a springboard diver, a discontented apprentice panel beater, a junior pole-vaulter, a VFL and Olympic Australian Rules footballer, a YCW extension worker in Queensland, a ten pin bowling instructor, a successful business executive within the funeral industry, a golfing tragic, a university lecturer and a published author.

Des joined the Malvern Branch of the YCW in 1954 while still a 15-year-old schoolboy at St Joseph’s Technical College Abbottsford. His older brother Barry – who at the time was assistant Melbourne YCW diocesan secretary to Dan Callahan and was later ordained to the priesthood – was Captain of the Malvern YCW under 18-football team and recruited Des as a player. After leaving Abbotsford at the end of 1954 Des joined the branch leaders group.

Terminating his apprenticeship indentures in 1957 and completing National Service Training, Des worked at the YCW Co-operatives before “volunteering” to work for the National YCW at the beginning of 1959. He was assigned to Queensland and has described his two years as a YCW extension worker as a “life changing experience.” The work took him throughout the vast state of Queensland where he helped establish new YCW branches in every Queensland diocese other than Cairns where the then Bishop refused to welcome the YCW.

The responsibility of the position and living away from home brought him a new maturity and as Des was to say “those years helped me become a person in my own right.”

“I was lucky enough to be a premiership player with the Coorporoo Football Club in the QANFL in 1960 but best of all I was to meet my future wife Margaret Cleary (a member of the Brisbane NCGM executive) to whom I have been married for 58 years,” he said. “We have been blessed with a good marriage, four loving, independent children and eleven beautiful grandchildren.”

Des joined the Tobin Brothers funeral business in 1961. He ultimately became the company CEO in 1982 and remained in that position until his retirement in 1998.

A man called Phonse

Biographer

He then turned his hand to writing and since 2003 he has written and published six biographical works.

His most recent work Just a Man Called Phonse – the biography of his late father A.V. (Phonse) Tobin – was published in October 2018..

The life of Phonse Tobin was anything but ordinary. Born in 1905, he followed on behind soldiers as they marched to the wharves to depart for World War I. He earned pocket money by trapping rats and collecting the South Melbourne Council’s rat bounty, and almost ‘haunted’ the Collins Street movie and live theatres.

After leaving school in 1919 he worked as a storeman, salesman, soldier and fireman. In 1934 Phonse and three of his brothers started what has become Australia’s most successful family-owned funeral service company – Tobin Brothers Funerals.

A natural entertainer, Phonse possessed a fine singing voice and produced many amateur theatrical productions in the 1930s. He was a good all-round sportsman and a successful professional footrunner. He was a long-serving member of the North Melbourne Football Club committee and was the club’s president from 1955 to 1957. He was a life member of both the NMFC and the VFL (now AFL).

Phonse was one of those rare characters who could meet, communicate and be at ease with people of all classes and walks of life – from prize fighters to prime ministers, from “mug” punters to wealthy publicans or bookmakers, from Knights of the Southern Cross to knights of the realm, from everyday parish priests to ‘princes’ of the church, and from grave diggers to governors.

Like everyone else, he had his failings. But these failings – such as they were – were more than offset by his strength of character, generous spirit, creative flair, kindness to people in need, and his love for and undying support of his family.

To obtain a copy of Just a Man Called Phonse (or other books by Des Tobin), visit Des’s website destobin.com.au, call him on 0417 510 211 or email destobin@killaghy.com

Des Ryan

Lessons from a township that resisted apartheid

Oukasie, South Africa

Can people on the wrong end of power change the world by working together? Or are the moments when the powerless take control of their own lives doomed to be snuffed out?

The question is raised by Kally Forrest’s book Bonds of Justice: The Struggle for Oukasie. It is another in the Hidden Voices series which aims to recover and preserve writings on society which would otherwise fall through publishers’ nets. The book is short and highly readable, and so is accessible to a non-academic audience. It has been some years in the making – it uses information gathered in 2011 and 2012. But the story it tells raises topical issues.

Forrest details the fight, in the last years of apartheid, of the people of Oukasie, a township near Brits in North West Province, against an attempt to force them to move to Lethlabile, 25 km from Brits, primarily because their presence offended white residents. While it was common under apartheid for black people to be removed to areas where they would be out of sight to whites, it was uncommon for those who faced this threat to resist it successfully. Oukasie did manage to defeat the attempted removal.

It organised to do this despite a sustained campaign by the apartheid authorities. This included the murder of anti-removal leaders and members of their family, but its chief strategy was to divide residents. So, resistance could only succeed if the resisters were organised and united. While thousands were induced to move, enough stayed to force the authorities to abandon the removal and agree that Oukasie be developed.

Unusual circumstances made Oukasie an ideal site for strong grassroots organisation in which people remain united because they share in decisions.

The Resistance

Brits was the site of strong worker organisation, largely the work of Young Christian Workers (YCW), founded by Roman Catholic priests as a vehicle for European workers to change exploitative conditions through organised efforts. YCW, which in Brits was open to non-Christians, stressed democratic grassroots organisation based on careful strategy summed up in its motto – “See, judge, act” – which encouraged members to reflect on what they saw before deciding what to do about it.

Young Christian Workers was political, since it challenged the effect of economic power on its members. But it was wary of the political movements which, it believed, wanted workers to act in ways which advanced the movements’ interests but not their own. It was able to maintain this stance because, in contrast to much of the rest of the country, the political organisations were not active in Oukasie.

Its attitude was identical to that of a section of the trade union movement which happened to be strongly represented in Brits. Its vehicle was the union which became the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (Numsa). Young Christian Workers’s members gravitated to it and it developed a strong presence in Oukasie. The resistance to removal relied on the same stress on grassroots participation and careful strategy which Young Christian Workers and Numsa adopted in the workplace.

The Oukasie resistance became, therefore, a test for an approach which relied on the efforts of grassroots people rather than high profile political leaders to change the world.

In one sense, this route to change worked. Oukasie was reprieved, and this was followed by a period of development. The Brits transitional local government which was elected in the mid-1990s was led by Levy Mamobolo, a unionist and anti-removal leader who, until his untimely death, led the area effectively and honestly. The first few years seemed to show that democratic local organisation could also produce political leadership which serves the people rather than itself.

But, as Forrest shows, the Oukasie story does not end happily. Leaders committed to public service were forced out of the local government; public services declined and corruption increased.

Forrest therefore frames her book not as a story of the triumph of a particular way of fighting for change but as evidence of what is possible if people organise themselves in the way Oukasie did. The author of an important book on Numsa, she is an advocate of the approach followed by Young Christian Workers, Numsa and the Oukasie resisters. She contrasts this with the selfish elitism which gained control of Brits.

But she leaves unanswered the key question: is the grassroots organisation which saved Oukasie a realistic route to change, or is it doomed to give way to the top-down leadership to which Brits succumbed?

What does the ultimate defeat mean?Given the importance of this question, it is a pity that Forrest does not analyse the defeat of grassroots democracy in Oukasie. We are left wondering how and why control passed from the “good guys” to the “bad guys”.

One reason may well have been that the governing African National Congress’s (ANC’s) politics turned out to be more powerful than those who supported the Oukasie resistance hoped. Forrest records that key figures in the resistance to removal joined the ANC and served in its committees once it was unbanned. This suggests that Oukasie’s ability to maintain an independent path was purely a result of happenstance (the lack of a political presence in the area).

Despite these limitations, the book makes an important contribution. Forrest’s sympathy for the Oukasie campaign does not prevent her from highlighting weaknesses. She acknowledges that the campaign failed to prevent thousands leaving Oukasie, and she documents the defeat of the politics she champions as Oukasie moved from resistance to local governance. This makes the book a highly credible account of the events it describes.

The book should, therefore, be read by anyone concerned with democracy’s future in South Africa, but in other contexts too. It should also trigger a debate on whether the political approach it describes is feasible.

Author

, Professor of Political Studies, University of Johannesburg

Source

The Conversation

World War II martyrs on both sides

Jocist martyrs

World War II in Europe ended 75 years ago in May 1945. Right to the end, however, JOC and JEC leaders continued to die in Nazi concentration camps.

The 23-year-old French YCW leader, Marcel Carrier, who had been sent to Germany as forced labour, was one of the last, dying at the Flossenburg concentration on 6 May 1945 – just two days before the end of fighting.

Married at eighteen, he was survived by his wife and three young daughters.

The French priest, René Giraudet, whose youthful ambition to become a missionary, had been thwarted by ill health, had volunteered to go to Germany to work as a clandestine chaplain to the workers who had been sent there.

Like Marcel Carrier, he was arrested for his work with the Catholic Action groups that had been organised among the French workers.

He was imprisoned in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp until its liberation by American troops on 15 April 1945. Already weakened by typhus, he was evacuated by plane to Paris where he died in hospital on 12 June.

However, Catholic Action martyrs were not restricted to the Allied side.

Born on 25 January 1885, Erich Klausener served in the German army during World War I. He was awarded the Iron Cross Second Class in 1914 and the Iron Cross First Class in 1917 for his bravery.

After the war, he became a public servant, serving in various ministries, heading the Police Division of the Ministry of the Interior from 1924.

In 1928, he became head of German Catholic Action and took a strong stand against the nazification of Germany during the 1930s.

On 24 June 1934, he openly criticised the growing violence of Hitler’s government in a speech to the Catholic Congress.

Six days later during the Night of the Long Knives on 30 June 1934, he was assassinated on the orders of Reinhard Heydrich.

Klausener was supported in his opposition to Hitler by Bishop August Von Galen. However, most German bishops failed to oppose the Nazi regime.

SOURCES

Marcel Carrier (Cardijn Pioneers)

René Giraudet (Cardijn Priests)

Erich Klausener (Spartacus Educational)Bishop August von Galen (Spartacus Educational)