Romeo Maione
YCW
Rome was invaded six weeks ago. But this time the invasion was a peaceful one. Yet this invasion will have lasting worldwide repercussions. What was it? 30,000 members of the Young Christian Workers Movement stormed Rome. They came from 87 countries. They took time out from their factories, their mines, their offices, their farms. Why? Because they wish to thank God and Pius XII for their interest in the workers of the world. They came to thank Pius XII for granting the International YCW its statutes. They came to share their lives, their problems, their missionary experiences in their working world.
These young workers are returning home now. They have been inspired by each other’s zeal and sacrifices for the cause of Christ. But more, they are encouraged and confident. The Pope has publicly blessed them and assured them of the importance of their mission. He pledged the support of the Vicar of Christ. The Pope’s message to the YCW leaves no doubt, leaves no room for innocent doubts or harmful prejudices. The scandal of the 19th century, the loss of the workers to the church, cannot be prolonged or unclear in the neo-industrial countries. In his talk, the Holy Father reminded the workers of the vast problems facing the world. He is especially concerned about the menace, the masses of working youth, Catholic and non-Catholic. Those who live and struggle today and those who will be born tomorrow. He graphically sketched what happens every year to vast numbers of young people who leave school and enter the work world.
“Leaving school to go to work, they are usually proud to play in their turn an active role in society. They are full of confidence in themselves. Very soon, however, cruel disillusionment fastens upon them. Too often they run up against difficult living conditions. They meet only misunderstandings, harshness, bad example. Slowly they absorb the poison of materialistic teachings, of attitudes warped by class warfare and hatred. Thus they rapidly lose, sometimes forever, their freshness, their joy, their most lawful aspirations and soon become bitter and rebel. Such is the disaster that the YCW wishes absolutely to avert.”
It is exactly this disaster which gave birth to the YCW. The great loss of young workers to human society and to the church. Workers are and feel that in the society which does not know, forgets or neglects human dignity and destiny, they are condemned to an animal life of dog-eat-dog. They rightly rebel against such an existence and try to escape to an artificial life, a life of opiates or as J. Folliet would say, myths. Which helps them forget society and the church.
The Holy Father has now repeated to all the participants of this lay apostolate congress what is our common responsibility to these new young workers. Last Saturday he told us, “throughout the world, every year, twenty million young people enter the world of work. Among them one may find Catholics, but also millions of others who are receptive to a religious formation. You must feel yourselves responsible for all of them. How many of them does the Church conserve? How many of them does she regain? Because the atmosphere of the place of work is harmful to the young man. The Catholic cell must become active in the workshops, but also in the trains, the buses, the families, the districts. It must be active everywhere, setting the tone, exercising good influence, spreading a new life.”
What does the YCW propose to do to avert this disaster of the young workers being lost to the Church? Four main things.
1. The YCW believes that the victims (and potential victims) must be the prime movers of the solution to the problem. They must be awakened to the problem. They must learn that there is hope because there is a Christian answer. They must be moved to use their efforts and the grace of God to change what is happening. Monsignor Cardijn, the founder of the YCW, repeats time and again, “we must have faith in the potentialities hidden in young workers.” His faith was more than rewarded by the recent pilgrimage. This was a project involving thirty thousand workers from all over the world and two million dollars. Its success was directed and realized by young worker leaders. To solve the crises that we face then, it is terribly important that we tap the vast reservoir that lies dormant in ordinary people. Every country has untold numbers of these people.
2. Secondly, the young workers must receive deep training through action. This sort of training is humanly satisfying, natural, most impressive and most lasting. The workers must be trained not just to recognize, face, suffer or resist problems. They must be challenged to use the grace of God in their efforts to change what is going on in life about them. Workers must be made to realize that their action or lack of action will affect the dignity of others as destined sons of God. They must be made to realize that what goes on in the worker’s life will very much determine the worker’s happiness now and for all eternity.
It is for this reason that the YCW sets up schools, YCW schools. These will be made up of from six to ten fellows or girls. They are initiated into the “living of the Christian life.” Week by week in parish halls, homes or what have you, they get together with a priest, study life around them and compare this reality to the Christian ideal. Conditions at work, wages, savings, participation in trade unions, leisure, home life, marriage, attitudes towards religion. Week by week they learn and act. Their lives and life with which they must come in contact become more like what Christ and the Church say it should be. Even small actions are signs that the workers are advancing in living and giving the good news of the Gospels and the teaching of the Church.
For example, a young worker goes out with his father for the first time in five years. Another attends his trade union meeting for the first time. Still another takes an interest in a sick person. These actions are small, but we must see them in the perspective of the young worker himself. In each of these small actions is hidden an intellectual discovery, a decision of the free will. For the young worker, these mean revelation and transformation. Catechisms, sermons, study clubs and reading can teach us the theory of love. Only an examination of life can tell us how to live it.
Of YCW’s educational technique, the Pope said on August 25th of this year, “It undertakes to mold minds and hearts in order to make them into men, conscious of their responsibilities and ready to face fearlessly the hardest tasks. This is because the YCW has, wherever it has worked for a long time, formed Christian leaders who, as such, are a hope for the social future of the Christian regeneration of the working world.”
3. The third element of a true solution of the problem of the working world. The apprentice or the well-trained apostle must not lose contact with his normal community of work and leisure. The YCW demands that the young worker remain in constant contact with these groups. This is the normal area for the worker’s apostolate. The worker has a responsibility to those around him. Through him, the church plants its roots deep in the field of the working world. Without his efforts, the working world is lost and left to naturalism and materialism, and may be even lost for all eternity.
4. Lastly, one of the elements of a true solution to the grave problem of the worker world is an apostolic movement of young workers who under the mandate of the hierarchy will take over the responsibility of bringing the good news to their fellow young workers.
The task of bringing the good news to the workers is a two-fold task. Although these tasks may be divided into different categories in the world of the person and the day-to-day apostolate, they cannot and must not be separated. One task is that of penetrating our Christian truths into the very heart of our way of life. In the case of work, this must mean that work must be made creative, must be made redemptive, must be made social, and at the same time develop the human person physically, mentally, and spiritually. These same truths must be made incarnate in all of our temporal institutions. In and through this task, the apostle must bring the same fellows not only to the idea of a good solid Christian society, but must bring him to the final truth that God so loved the world that he sent his only Son to save the world. In other words, it is not enough to offer workers a better material world, but we must bring the workers to the belief in Christ.
But who will do this if not the same people who are deeply involved in the building of the Christian city, who understand the problems, attitudes, mentality, and who above all speak the language of these same workers. Speaking in the same vein, the Pope told the YCW, “You are not engaged in a temporal combat merely to obtain a few advantages of economic or social nature. Rather, you aim above all at the conquest of souls. In the souls of your brothers who do not yet know Christ or do not serve him faithfully, that decisive battle takes place. It is your duty to make the Savior known, to make his law permeate all the sectors of private and public life.”
The Holy Father has given us clear directives again in his message to this Congress. At the present time, even the lay apostle in the factories needs a solid knowledge of economic, social, and political affairs as well as of the social doctrine of the Church. And moreover, he states, “We would like to attract your attention especially to an aspect on the education of young Catholics, the formation of their apostolic spirit. Instead of giving way to a tendency which is slightly selfish, thinking only of the salvation of their souls, may they also become conscious of their responsibility towards others and the means of aiding them.”
This is a time for action, and the world of work awaits the action of the apostle.
Romeo Maione, Intervention at Second World Congress on Lay Apostolate, Rome, 1957