A few weeks ago I received a tiny photograph of a group of local girls from an unknown town in Japan, Kokura. On the back, it read: “A YCW member from Kokura, surrounded by twenty-four young women workers from her factory who now make up her team and whom she is preparing for baptism”. In her humility, the young Nipone activist forgot to mention her name….
The section at Tshéla, in the Belgian Congo, is making inroads into the mass of young indigenous workers at a 15,000-strong oil mill. It had just chosen a new president; unexpectedly, Paul N’s comrades voted for him? But Paul refused as he didn’t think he was up to the job. After the meeting, he went to see the chaplain: “Father, I cannot accept to be the president of the section …. if I am not in good standing with my conscience”. And Paul asked to receive the sacrament of marriage, to put an end to the bad example of cohabitation he was setting for others. The next day, he accepted responsibility for the section.
The activists and YCW members in the Ruhr (Germany) worked hard to transform their workplaces. They soon realised that their action could only be meaningful if it was nourished by the sources of grace: Mass, frequent communion, the use of the sacraments that would strengthen and purify them. Impossible, they have to leave home too early in the morning and come home late at night; the church is closed….nowadays it’s the factory that dictates the rhythm of life! They carried out a survey among their fellow workers and noted the appalling lack of sacramental life among young workers in their region. Humbly, they presented figures and facts to their bishops. After making representations to Rome, evening Masses were authorised in these dioceses and the level of religious life among young workers improved month by month thanks to their action.
There were still only a handful of YCW sections in Calcutta; it was the first seed of YCWism sown on Indian soil. Young people without caste or profession, to whom the YCW has placed its trust: they too are sons and daughters of God. In Christian parishes, the faithful were invited to publicly express their opinion on the campaign launched across the country for voluntary birth control. It was the Jocists who protested most vigorously, with arguments full of intelligence and dignity. And it was their letters that were picked up and commented on in the major non-Catholic newspapers.
…These are just a few of the very common examples of news that arrive daily at the International Secretariat of the YCW in Brussels and which are the most profound and living testimony of what this international movement is all about. Today, sixty-two countries experience the Young Christian Workers, including fifteen mission countries that have welcomed it since the last war.
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What is the YCW? Could it be expressed better than by the abundance of these testimonies, so moving in their simplicity and so effective in their realism? You don’t discover the YCW in theory, in books or in lessons….you feel it pulsating in the very lives of the 1,200,000 YCW members scattered to the four winds of the world, in the tropics and in the mines, in sanatoria, missionaries in the African bush and even on the steps of parliaments and in the corridors of the UN.
Because the YCW is everywhere. Today it has consultative status with the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations, as well as with Unesco; it collaborates in the efforts of the European Youth Campaign to spread the European spirit among young people in the working world; it is a member of the Steering Committee of the Conference of Presidents of International Catholic Organisations and of the World Youth Assembly…
Above all, it lives by an intense missionary spirit and a fraternal charity that it wants to be total and universal. In less than three years, I have known more than ten YCW leaders who, on their own initiative, without any propaganda effort or any promise other than brutal poverty, decided to leave their homes and their homelands to become lay missionaries in the service of the Young Workers: Jacques, a young Belgian of 19, and René, from Nice, who set out to “clear the land” in immense Brazil; Simone and Henriette, two ardent Frenchwomen working “in the dark” from Tunis to Casablanca; Gabriel, in Black Africa and Wim, in the mining populations of Chile; and the last, Manuel, q tenacious Portuguese, who last month offered to “go anywhere, and for any job.”
Wherever you are, take a close look at the YCW, and you’ll understand where it gets its international power that a superficial look cannot grasp; its irresistible dynamism that makes the smallest the strongest – those who, without words or noise, carry the light and life of Christ among the damned of the earth and the starving.
Here, it is the sacrifices of Belgian jocists who bring a comrade from Mauritius to Europe or adopt the YCW. from Haiti; there, it is those from Austria who offer an hour of their salary to save the young people stricken by the Po thanks to the welcome service of the YCW in Ferrara. And they were immediately challenged by their comrades from Barcelona, who didn’t agree to give an hour of their wages to support the international YCW.: “One hour? but that’s not the point, what could the international YCW do with a few pesetas? here, we adopt at least double the amount of the slogan given!
And then there were the 20,000 people who, from all corners of Europe, went to the feet of Our Lady, with dying people, with girls who had been taken into custody, with former communists, to ask their Mother of Lourdes for a miracle – yes, a miracle: the salvation of their brothers and sisters at work!
In 1950, Brussels had its Jubilee Congress of 100,000 YCW members and its International Conference with 42 nations represented. Yesterday, the European Conference in Kleve (Germany) brought together in friendship those who had been enemies during the war. Tomorrow, the meeting in Rio de Janeiro and the Continental Meeting of the Caribbean….
Life and the re-Christianisation of the world are being prepared in these fraternal meetings. But it is happening today, and tomorrow, and every day, in every gesture that bears witness to Christ.
“Not words, deeds”. This is how the International J.O.C. wants to change the world!
Marguerite Fiévez
SOURCE
CARHOP, Fiévéz n° 12.