Remembering Cardijn's role at Vatican II

“'Vatican II canonised Cardijn,' I remember late Melbourne Archbishop Frank Little saying as he regaled us with his story of meeting the YCW founder while studying in Rome," writes Stefan Gigacz.

"What's more there was a whole generation of Australian bishops and priests, who told similar stories, starting with his predecessor Archbishop Justin Simonds, and including Brisbane Archbishop Frank Rush, Adelaide's James Gleeson, Perth's Redmond Prindiville and many others.

"Archbishop Little's message stayed with me, and was later reinforced by a biography of Cardijn by his co-workers, Marguerite Fievez and Jacques Meert, that detailed his role at the Council in promoting the specific task of the laity as the building up of the world.

"So in 1995, when I began doing research on the origins of the International Young Christian Workers movement, I looked forward to the publication of the first volume of a major History of Vatican II.

"But after forking out over $100 for Volume I, I reached for the index – only to be deflated to find not a single mention of Cardijn."

Read the full article here:

The saint at Vatican II (CathNews)

CCI is this year launching its 50th anniversary of Vatican II program with a conference "Vatican 2 + 50: A Cardijn Perspective" to be held in Manila, Philippines from 11-14 October 2012.

Click here for details: www.vatican2plus50.com

Read More

'Cardijn in Australia' conference success

The 'Cardijn in Australia' conference held in Melbourne from 4-6 November honoured cooperative pioneer Ted Long and other significant figures of the Australian Cardijn movements.

In a moving address, co-operative champion and historian Dr Race Mathews compared the role of YCW Cooperative co-founder Ted Long with that of Joseph Cardijn, founder of the YCW, and that of Jose-Maria Arizmendiarrietta, founder of the Mondragon cooperatives in Spain.

It was a fitting tribute to Long, who died in 2009 in relative anonymity despite the enormous role that he played alongside Frank McCann and other pioneers of the lay apostolate both in the development of the Young Christian Workers and of the cooperative movement in Australia.

Dr Mathews highlighted not only the role of Ted Long but also that of Cardijn, whose work had directly inspired the work of Father Arizmendi in the Basque region of Spain. I had known for some that Father Arizmendi had been a YCW chaplain in the town of Mondragon but Dr Mathews spelled out the direct linkage between Cardijn and Arizmendi.

Having myself earlier lamented that Donald Rumsfeld deserved the title of patron saint of Cardijn movement history for his famous quote about "unknown unknowns", I rejoiced to hear Dr Mathews shedding light on the contributions of Long and Cardijn.

And yet so much still remains to be done to adequately record the historical role of those movements in Australia.

Indeed, I still regret that we failed to make a video recording of Ted Long himself or of the late Father Cyril Hally, who had attended the founding meeting of the Cardijn Community in Australia in July 2008 before going to his eternal reward.

And there are so many others who have magnificent stories to tell of what the early Australian Cardijn movements achieved and it is urgent to record them.

Although I had long been aware that Cardijn was full of praise for the local YCW movements during his visits to Australia in 1958 and 1966, I had always tended to discount this as playing up to his hosts. It was only much later when I went to work for the International YCW during the 1980s that it slowly dawned on me that no other city in the world ever had a YCW on the scale of the movement in Melbourne in the 1950s and 60s.

No wonder then that Cardijn told his Australian hosts in 1958 that  "your YCW has developed as I dreamt a YCW should develop."

And yet by the time that I was invited to join the YCW at the end of 1974 most of that movement had simply disappeared.

Many reasons have been proffered to explain what happened - sociological changes, post-Vatican II turmoil, "the 1970s", etc.

Whatever the causes, the dramatic decline of the Cardijn movements also somehow threw a veil over the achievements the previous thirty years - and even over the smaller scale achievements of the movements during the last thirty years.

So it was highly refreshing to hear so many conference speakers testifying to the impact of the movements in their own lives, as was the fact that at least half of the conference participants looked to be under 30.

In a remarkable keynote address which will hopefully be available on the web shortly, Darwin Bishop Eugene Hurley told a particularly powerful story of a YCW leader from the Port Pirie diocese, Margie Lee, who became a quadriplegic as a result of a car accident and who consciously and cheerfully sought to discover and to live out her own vocation as a handicapped person assisting others to deal with their own traumas.

Amazingly, the oldest participant at the conference, Des O'Connell, turned out to be possibly the last surviving member of the fabled Campion Society as well as a member of the equally storied Maryknoll intentional community established to the east of Melbourne during the 1950s.

In fact, it was largely through the Campion Society leader Kevin T. Kelly that the Cardijn movements were first introduced into Australia.

The Cardijn in Australia conference opened or re-opened many windows on the achievements of the Cardijn-inspired movements. Ultimately, however, the purpose was to build for the future.

Appropriately, the conference ended with a workshop on developing enquiries - the key to the Cardijn method of action and formation - as well as with a number of exciting proposals for the development of study groups and even hopefully a Cardijn Institute.

There's life yet in the Cardijn movements, dare I say the best is yet to come.

Stefan Gigacz

SOURCE

CathBlog - Melbourne was YCW capital of the world (CathNews)

PHOTOS

PHOTOS

http://www.flickr.com/photos/69880589@N03/

Read More

Read Cardijn's biography online

Today is World Youth Day 2011. Over one million young people from around the world are gathered on the outskirts of Madrid, Spain to celebrate the event with Pope Benedict XV.

It's a great day also to launch the online publication of the Marguerite Fievez and Jacques Meert biography of Joseph Cardijn.

First published in French in 1969, the English translation by the late Fr Edward Mitchinson came off the presses in 1974. The biography has thus been effectively out of print for the last 30 years or so.

In recent years, it has become possible occasionally to find a second hand copy at an online bookshop.

However, now we are proud to again make available this important biography to the whole English speaking world.

With Fernand Tonnet and Paul Garcet, Jacques Meert was one of the famous "founder trio" of the YCW. He worked with Cardijn from the age of 18.

Marguerite Fievez became a YCW leader in the 1930s, and from 1945 was effectively the first secretary-general of the IYCW, a post she held until 1957 when the first official International Council was held in Rome.

From 1957, she became Cardijn's personal assistant until his death in 1967 after which she devoted the next 20 years of her life to compiling his personal archives which are now held in the Royal Archives of Belgium. From then on until her death in 2000, she worked on the archiving of the records of the JOC in Belgium as well as those of the IYCW.

Thus this biography of Cardijn is the personal record of two people who worked side by side with Cardijn from 1919 until his passing in 1967.

Moreover, it is also a scientifically written history since Marguerite and Jacques chose to work with the historian Professor Roger Aubert  from the Catholic University of Louvain in compiling their history.

As the authors say in the introduction, it is only the "first biography" of Cardijn and much more remains to be rewritten.

Nevertheless, it is also an irreplaceable almost eye-witness account of his life.

Read it here.

Read More

Cardijn taught the Church to See Judge Act

This month marks the 50th anniversary of the adoption by the Church of the See – Judge – Act method as part of Catholic social teaching and practice.

Pope John XXII formally recognized the See Judge Act method in his encyclical Mater et Magistra published on 15 May 1961.

In a statement, the Cardijn Community International recalls that it was the late Cardinal Joseph Cardijn, founder of the Young Christian Workers (YCW) movement, who had suggested to Pope John that he issue an encyclical to mark the 70th anniversary of Pope Leo's XIII landmark encyclical Rerum Novarum.

In response, Pope John requested Cardijn to provide an outline of issues to be addressed in the encyclical. This he did in a twenty page memorandum submitted to the pontiff.

When Mater et Magistra appeared just over a year later, the encyclical noted that “there are three stages which should normally be followed in the reduction of social principles into practice.” (Paragraph 236).

“First, one reviews the concrete situation,” Pope John wrote, “secondly, one forms a judgement on it in the light of these same principles; thirdly, one decides what in the circumstances can and should be done to implement these principles.

“These are the three stages that are usually expressed in the three terms: look, judge, act,” the encyclical continued.

“We believe that even Cardijn was surprised to discover the extent of this recognition in the encyclical,” commented Cardijn Community International convenor, MJ Ruben.

“Since then, the See – Judge – Act method has been recognized and adopted by the whole Church,” Ruben continued.

“It shows how Cardijn was a teacher for the whole Church – not only for young workers,” he said.

“It is another reason that we hope that Cardijn will one day be recognized as a Doctor of the Church,” he concluded.

Read More

See, Judge, Act – Fifty years of Catholic social practice

This month marks the 50^th anniversary of Pope John XXIII's encyclical Mater et Magistra, which in its turn recalled the 70^th anniversary of Pope Leo XIII's groundbreaking social encyclical Rerum Novarum on the condition of the workers.

Few today, however, will remember that it was Joseph Cardijn who proposed the writing of this encyclical to Pope John during an audience he had with the Pope in March 1960. At the pope's request, Cardijn prepared a twenty page dossier of ideas and suggestions for the envisaged encyclical.

Fourteen months later on 15 May 1961, even Cardijn was surprised when Pope John published Mater et Magistra which specifically adopted the famous See – Judge – Act method that he had championed throughout his life.

“There are three stages which should normally be followed in the reduction of social principles into practice,” Pope John wrote (Paragraph 236) in the encyclical.

“First, one reviews the concrete situation; secondly, one forms a judgement on it in the light of these same principles; thirdly, one decides what in the circumstances can and should be done to implement these principles. These are the three stages that are usually expressed in the three terms: look, judge, act.”

Acting upon Cardijn's inspiration, Pope John thus specifically incorporated the “See – Judge - Act” method into Catholic social teaching and practice.

Four years later in an address to the Second Vatican Council, Cardijn, now a Cardinal, would insist on the importance of this legacy.

“I have shown confidence in [young people’s] freedom so as to better educate that freedom”, Cardijn told the Council in an address on religious freedom.

“I helped them to see, judge and act by themselves, by undertaking social and cultural action themselves, freely obeying authorities in order to become adult witnesses of Christ and the Gospel, conscious of being responsible for their sisters and brothers in the whole world,” he said (20 September 1965) in a phrase that recalls the famous definition of democracy adopted by the Sillon (Furrow) movement of Marc Sangnier as the system of “social organisation that tends to maximise the civic consciousness and responsibility of each person”.

Indeed, Cardijn's “see, judge, act” formula neatly summarised the “method of democratic education” in “study circles” that the Sillon had pioneered in France at the turn of the 20^th century.

"Every citizen must know the state of the nation; when the situation is evil, he must seek solutions; and lastly, having found the solutions, he must act,” wrote Marc Sangnier outlining the enquiry method used by the Sillon as early as 1899.

But it was Cardijn who perfected the method and made it the foundation stone of the Young Christian Workers (YCW) movement from where it would be adopted later by so many other lay apostolate groups and movements.

“Leaders and members learning to see, judge, and act; to see the problem of their temporal and eternal destiny to judge the present situation, the problems, the contradiction, the demands of an eternal and temporal destiny; to act with a view to the conquest of their temporal and eternal destiny,” as he told delegates to the First International Congress of the YCW in 1935.

Cardijn indeed saw himself as a teacher and educator of young workers. Fifty years after Mater et Magistra, we can see clearly today that he was also a great teacher of the whole Church.

As we celebrate the half century of the “See – Judge – Act encyclical”, we renew the call made in 1998 by former leaders of the International YCW for Cardijn to be recognised as a “Doctor of the Church”.

Cardijn Community International

20 May 2011

Read More

Cardijn and Rerum Novarum

This month we remember not only the 120th anniversary of Pope Leo XIII's landmark encyclical on the condition of the workers, Rerum Novarum, but also its successor encyclicals, which together have helped build the foundations of Catholic social thought and teaching.

Today, Rerum Novarum is well recognised as the first of the Catholic Church's social encyclicals. For the first time, the Church formally recognised the right of workers to organise in trade unions. The encyclical also laid out the elements of a just wage that would orient workers' demands for many decades into the future.

Published in 1891 at the height of the European Industrial Revolution, Rerum Novarum was also a key formative document in the life of the young Joseph Cardijn who was later to found the Young Christian Workers movement. Aged nine years, he read the encyclical aloud to his illiterate father.

It was a document that would have a decisive impact on his whole life as an advocate for the workers, particularly young workers.

Later, in 1931, when Pope Pius XI, published the encyclical Quadragesimo Anno to mark the 40th anniversary of Rerum Novarum, he made specific reference to Cardijn's emerging YCW movement.

“The ranks of the workers themselves are already giving happy and promising signs of a social reconstruction,” Pope Pius XI wrote. “To Our soul's great joy, We see in these ranks also the massed companies of young workers, who are receiving the counsel of Divine Grace with willing ears and striving with marvelous zeal to gain their comrades for Christ.” (Paragraph 140)

Thirty years later, Cardijn would suggest to Pope John XXIII that he also write an encyclical to mark the 70th anniversary of Rerum Novarum.

“It is time the Church talked about work again,” Cardijn told Pope John during a private audience in March 1960. “The issue is not the same now in 1960 as it was in the time of Leo XIII or Pius XI.”

“No-one could have foreseen then its present dimensions, its universality, its technological aspect, its influence on every race and on young people generally. An encyclical dealing with the world of work today would have an impact even greater than Rerum Novarum or Quadragesimo.”

“But it needs to be a positive encyclical, open to the collaboration necessary,” Cardijn told the Pope, warning him gently against a document that would simply condemn various evils.

“Write your ideas and send them to me,” the Pope told Cardijn.

The result just over a year later on 15 May 1961 was the encyclical Mater et Magistra.

This was the encyclical that would formally endorse the “see, judge, act” method as part of Catholic social teaching.

“There are three stages which should normally be followed in the reduction of social principles into practice,” Pope John wrote (Paragraph 236).

“First, one reviews the concrete situation; secondly, one forms a judgment on it in the light of these same principles; thirdly, one decides what in the circumstances can and should be done to implement these principles. These are the three stages that are usually expressed in the three terms: look, judge, act.”

Later this teaching would also be taken up by Vatican II, notably in Gaudium et Spes, the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World.

For this reason, the Cardijn Community International plans to promote a three year campaign to mark the 50th anniversary of Vatican II from 2012-2015.

In a world where the industrial revolution has reached every continent to become a truly global phenomenon, let us recall Cardijn's own contribution to the Church's social thought and practice.

- Cardijn Community International, 17 May 2011

Read More

Karol Wojtyla met Cardijn at Pontifical Belgian College

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

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

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

SOURCE

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

Read More

Cardijn still relevant: Father Tissa

“Cardijn is still relevant in contemporary reality. CCI must bring Cardijn closer to the youth through his approach and See-Judge-Act method. The primordial role of the youth in the world should not be undermined,” says Fr Tissa Balasuriya, O.M.I., the world renowned sociologist and social activist.

“I was formed by the students,” claims the theologian who spent a decade of his life as the Chaplain of the International Movement of Catholic Students in Asia.

Fr Tissa in an informal hour long chat with the team of international leaders of Cardijn Community International (CCI) touched upon critical issues faced by the world today.

“Globalization is too vast an area and cannot be generalized,” Father Tissa continued saying “There are positive aspects of modern science and technology which could be used for action towards social change and uniting people.”

“We have distorted Christ,” he continued. To a question on how he felt at the time he was ex-communicated from the Church, he said he took it as ‘in-communication’ and not ‘ex-communication’.

Talking about ‘climate change’ Fr Tissa called upon everyone to respect the ‘rights of Mother Earth’ and work towards ‘climate justice’. He said that ‘climate justice’ is definitely part of the ‘mission of the Church’.

To a question on what keeps him going even at this age, Fr Tissa declared with a firm conviction that it was ‘LOVE’.

“The gap between the rich and poor is widening at an alarming pace. The rich are getting enormously richer and the poor very poor’ says Fr. Tissa who vouches that the ‘the teaching of Jesus was so sublime and simple. Loving your neighbor is loving God. Working towards building peace, truth and equality to prevail is the form of love we are supposed to practice but unfortunately this teaching has been distorted and manipulated,” says the octogenarian theologian.

Commenting on the forthcoming 50th anniversary of Vatican II, Fr Tissa said that another Council is necessary.

“It is the urgent need today that all of us should place our demand for another Council which shall make the Church more relevant,” he said.

The See-Judge-Act otherwise known as the Review of Life method is developed by Cardijn and is used by many Catholic Action groups and movements in the world. Cardijn Community International (CCI) provides a space for adherents of the method and the members of these movements to continue sharing experiences and show support to relevant development actions in communities.

The CCI team was on a visit to Sri Lanka to meet groups and communities involved in social action and to seek partners and supporters for the network in Sri Lanka.

The team comprised M. J. Ruben, International Convenor, Fr. S. Servatius, International Collaborator, Ms Glynis Joseph, Asia-Pacific Coordinator and Ms Kins Aparece, CCI-Philippines Coordinator.

Links

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tissa_Balasuriya

http://tissabalasuriya.wordpress.com/

Read More