A journey with Joseph Cardijn & the Jocist Network (1959-65)
On 11 October 1962, IYCW president, Bartolo Perez, flew to Rome for the official opening of the Council, accompanied by another IYCW leader, likely Betty Villa.
Cardijn did not accompany them.
SOURCE
Stefan Gigacz, The Leaven in the Council, Chapter 7, The Council opens without Cardijn (Australian Cardijn Institute)
On 8 October 1962 – three days before the official opening of the First Session of the Council – the members of the IYCW International Secretariat wrote to Pope John expressing their hopes and commitments for the Council.
Their main concern however was to ensure recognition of the apostolate of the laity as understand by the YCW movement and promoted by Cardijn:
We also thought of expressing a hope that exists throughout the whole Church by requesting Your Holiness that the Second Vatican Council specify the mission of the apostolate of the laity and of the organised laity in the Church, and provide orientations regarding its insertion into the overall pastoral care of the Church. As a movement of young workers, we would like to humbly request official recognition of the need for the proper, personal and community apostolate of the workers and young workers themselves, and an insistence on the apostolic formation which needs be given to this population group.
In light of Cardijn’s difficulties in the Prep Com on Lay Apostolate, the ongoing criticism from Cardinal Suenens and the fact that Cardijn had not been appointed as a peritus, it is clear that the IYCW leaders were highly concerned at the direction the Council might take,
Read the full letter below.
To His Holiness Pope John XXIII.
Most Holy Father,
On the occasion of the annual meeting of its Executive Committee, which took place in Berlin in September 1962, the International YCW wishes to express to Your Holiness, on the eve of the opening of the Ecumenical Council of Vatican II, how much it participates in the faith and hope which animate Catholics throughout the world before this event of providential value for the life of the Church both at present and for the future. She especially wishes to thank Your Holiness for having convened this Council, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, and for having deployed, with a view to its preparation, an immense activity in which so many personalities so rich in thought and experience were associated.
In the name of the entire international YCW, we wish to inform Your Holiness how much we pledge,, to unite ourselves with the Council in prayer and apostolic action among the young workers of the whole world.
Henceforth, we promise Your Holiness and the whole Hierarchy of the Church that, with the grace of Christ, we will neglect no effort to put into practice the orientations that the Council will provide, in the same attitude of fidelity and with the same enthusiasm, with which we have endeavoured to spread knowledge and worked on the application of the providential encyclical “Mater et Magistra.”
Your Holiness knows how, in more than 90 countries of the world, young men and women workers within the YCW and the Church are striving to respond to their vocation as apostles of Christ and the Church in the whole of their lives, in all their circles, among their working brothers and sisters. It is the YCW’s intention to constantly multiply among the humble and the little ones of this world the number of those who commit themselves to live Christianly and apostolically, to unite them in an organised laity and to collaborate with the Hierarchy for the Christian solution of the problems of life and the Christianisation of all young workers of the whole world.
It is in this spirit that we would like to express to Your Holiness some good wishes, which we humbly ask Him to submit to the Ecumenical Council.
The surveys that the YCW has carried out in all the countries where it exists regularly underline how much living conditions, both in rich and industrialised countries and in developing countries, influence the religious and moral life of young workers. Could we express the desire that in the pastoral care and liturgy of the Church, an effort be made to be very close to the realities of the life of young workers so that they can more easily find an answer to their spiritual hunger in the Church?
We also thought of expressing a hope that exists throughout the whole Church by requesting Your Holiness that the Second Vatican Council specify the mission of the apostolate of the laity and of the organised laity in the Church, and provide orientations regarding its insertion into the overall pastoral care of the Church. As a movement of young workers, we would like to humbly request official recognition of the need for the proper, personal and community apostolate of the workers and young workers themselves, and an insistence on the apostolic formation which needs be given to this population group.
To concretise this participative effort of young workers in the Council through prayer, the International YCW has launched an appeal to all the national movements, requesting that they ask YCW members and young workers to offer up to the Lord all their work every Friday for the duration of the Council. This offering of work with its joys and sorrows, or sometimes the offering up of a “lack of work,” is a prayer that the young workers will make in union with the prayers of the whole Church for the success of the Council.
Your Holiness, please accept with all Your goodness as the common Father of men, the feeling of total adherence as well as the desires and the promises which we wish to express in the name of the young workers of the world.
Renewing the expression of our total fidelity to Your Holiness, we humbly request You to give Your paternal blessing to the whole movement throughout the world.
Bartolo Perez, President.
Jos. Cardijn, Chaplain General.
Brussels, October 8, 1962.
Betty Villa, Vice President.
Brussels, 8 October, 1962.
Source
JOCI Archives 6.3
Cardijn introduced the discussion at the special meeting of several members of the JOCI Executive Committee on 28 October 1960.
Unsurprisingly, he began by insisting on the “necessity of the worker apostolate” and recalling Pius XI’s statement that the first apostles of workers needed to be “the workers themselves.”
Workers thus needed to act themselves to solve “the problem of the worker world,” he said.
Begin with our experience as clergy and laity
JOCI vice-president, Maria Meersman, added that it was necessary to “begin with our experience” as “clergy and laity.”
Evidently referring to certain documents, JOCI secretary-general René Salanne noted that “we find ourselves before an amalgam of definitions.” The JOC, however, “began from problems,” he added. And there was a problem of “young people caught up in industrial evolution” who needed to be able to “accomplish their complete destiny,” he explained.
French priest, Jean Noddings, who had many years of experience working with the JOC in West Africa, warned that young workers could not be reached through “general pastoral approach.” By the nature of their environment they were unable to be reached this way, he continued.
Another priest, Fr Martin, also probably a French priest working in North Africa, noted that industrialisation was also destroying the religious sense of young Muslims.
Canadian Holy Cross Father, Oscar Mélanson, who also had many years of experience with the JOC in Brazil, agreed, noting that young worker militants remained at the “margins of the Church.”
Church continued to make same mistakes
Also Canadian, JOCI president, Romeo Maione, warned that the Church in many countries was making the same mistakes that it had made during the industrial revolution in Europe. The Church’s mode of evangelisation was designed for a “static world” or a “village church” rather than in view of the “new civilisation” that was emerging.
Summarising, Cardijn noted that many countries were still at the beginning of the industrialisation process and young workers, even those who had been baptised, were not being reached by the Church, let alone those of other religions.
Young people were not being formed to recognise the “value of their work” or “their personal dignity” or to address their problems, he noted.
René Salanne added that these were not just problems of young workers but “life problems.” Hence, the need to give meaning to life as “the Creator desired.”
Romeo Maione noted that the Church and others continued to start from “ideas” and thus “intellectualised Christ’s message.”
Life learning needed not “catechetics”
People needed “to learn from life,” he stated, warning that the masses did not learn “from courses.”
Fr Noddings agreed, noting a growing popularisation of “catechetics” rather than beginning with life.
Citing Spanish JOC chaplain, Don Mauro Rubio Repulles, Maione added that people, including priests, needed to “learn to see.”
“The priest who enters the seminary at age eighteen has not observed life before entering,” Maione warned, “And afterwards he is outside of life.”
Meersman added that it was necessary to “make the act of faith beginning with the action of the Holy Spirit in the life of people and events.”
Assistant international chaplain, Marcel Uylenbroeck, noted the need to “list the various problems,” including starting work at an early age, which was a cause of “dehumanisation” and hence also “dechristianisation.” He also noted the need to deal with communism on a “positive” basis.
Anguish for workers
Fr Mélanson added that it was necessary for the Council to develop “an anguish about the workers” and to develop a “humanism” that would save the masses.
Betty Villa from the Philippines noted that a critique of the YCW in Hong Kong was that it did not “help the parish,” e.g. with catechetics. In other words, the work of the YCW was not understood. She added that there was no link between the Gospel preached on Sundays and daily life. Hence, young workers did not know how to act.
Fr Noddings added that if priests really understood Catholic Action (in the JOC sense), they would do catechetics quite differently.
Maione added that the Council needed to make an option in favour of a “specialised” apostolate, a specialisation based on “realities” rather than “class.”
Fr Mélanson pointed to the problems of developing countries and the associated “frightening” issue of “urbanisation.”
Cardijn added that work had been “robbed of its meaning” and the need to give it a new community-based meaning. He noted that young people had a strong “democratic” sense to the point of being ready to die.
René Salanne noted that Quadragesimo Anno was outdated and suggested that perhaps a new encyclical was needed every five years.
Cardijn suggested that the Council needed to create a new Secretariat for engaging with non-Christians and perhaps for a new Congregation to study the problems of lay people in the Church.
SOURCE
Compte rendu de la réunion de quelques membres de la Comité Exécutif (Joseph Cardijn Digital Library)