The see-judge-act method is “the driving force and inspiration of the YCW movement; to build an intense formation in Christ that then goes out to build God’s Kingdom,” Melbourne Archbishop Peter Comensoli observed in his homily at a YCW Centenary Mass on Saturday 24 May.
The Mass and Reunion were held at All Saints Church, Fitzroy.
This is the full text of Archbishop Comensoli’s homily:
Archbishop Justin Simonds, my predecessor, played a significant part in the foundation and direction of the Young Christian Workers here in Melbourne. As a young priest, he had experienced the Jocist movement in Belgium during the 1920s, just as YCW was commencing in Australia.*
In the late 1930s, now as a recently appointed Bishop, Simonds became the national Secretary to Catholic Action, into which YCW would find its home in this country. And by the 1940s, he had been appointed by Archbishop Mannix to the recently established YCW in Melbourne.
It was in this capacity that Archbishop Simonds would deliver an address in June 1943 that became seen as the articulation of the purpose and vision of YCW. I suspect this speech will be quite familiar to many of you here today.
This new movement of YCW in Australia, although by then a firm part of the expanding international reality of Catholic Action, was part of the decisive turn in the Church towards the lay apostolate, where baptism, not ordination, was to be seen as the primary vocational calling.
In admittedly somewhat archaic language, but nonetheless in truth, Simonds noted this in his speech.
Beginning with Baptism, the militants set out with the determination of impressing on each member… the great truth that by Baptism man is born to a life that is divine, and incorporated into membership of the Mystical Body of Christ and the communion of saints.
Beginning with Baptism, the militants set out with the determination of impressing on each member… the great truth that by Baptism man is born to a life that is divine, and incorporated into membership of the Mystical Body of Christ and the communion of saints.
Here, in YCW, was already the flowering of what would come to be articulated in the Second Vatican Council as the call of the laity to its proper mission in the world and to its secular character.
These faithful are by baptism made one body with Christ and are constituted among the People of God; they are in their own way made sharers in the priestly, prophetical, and kingly functions of Christ; and they carry out for their own part the mission of the whole Christian people in the Church and in the world. (LG.31)
As Simonds would say on that evening in 1943, “[the Jocist movement] is a share which the laity receives in the Apostolate of the Bishops.”
This was always on the mind of Jesus, for the lay faithful. As we just heard from his own lips, “My mother and my brothers are those who hear God’s word and put it into practice.” It does not require much imagination to see in Jesus’ words, what is the Cardijn way adopted by YCW: see, judge, act.
By observation of the world; by consideration of it in Christ; and by acting towards the Kingdom. This is, what Vatican II would describe as, “the duty [of the Church] of scrutinizing the signs of the times and of interpreting them in the light of the Gospel.” (GS.4) Or, to use the language of Pope Francis – the Church that listens; the Church that discerns; the Church that journeys.
‘See, judge, act’ remains the way of YCW. That this is to find its place and articulation among the youth should not be missed. It was – and I hope still is – the driving force and inspiration of the YCW movement; to build an intense formation in Christ that then goes out to build God’s Kingdom. To use the words of Archbishop Simonds once more,
The founder of the [YCW] was determined that its work… should cover the whole [young] person… with an entire formation-religious, intellectual, social, vocational and moral… It is our special apostolate to spiritualise the lives of [young people].
Archbishop Peter Comensoli
* It was the YCW in Belgium that was developing in the late 1920s. The first initiatives for the Australian YCW were during the late 1930s.
