Yesterday, we looked at what would the Australian milieu look like.
Fr. Cardijn also noted that the real young Christian worker, and the real Young Christian Workers movement, can be recognised by three inseparable characteristics.
- The YCW aims to transform the mass of working youth.
- The YCW aims to re-Christianise the real life of working-class youth.
- The YCW aims to reclaim the milieu or environment in which the mass of young workers work and live.
What would transform, re-Christianise, and reclaim mean?
Paul McGuire and John Fitzsimons offer this view.
The immediate task of Catholic Action is not to transform society, but to form consciences. The transformation of society can only appear as an effect of transformed consciences. If consciences are rightly ordered, there will be right order in society. If our institutions are disordered and perverted, it is because our moral values are perverse and disordered. Society is composed of men and women. Its moral health depends upon their moral health. Catholic Action is a mission to men and women. It seeks to extend to them the meaning, the peace, the order of Christ our Lord, so that all things may be restored in Him…
…In this new world, all old things were threatened. The ancient order of Christendom had been shattered, and the soul of Christendom, its belief in Christ, seemed doomed to die. The traditional organisation of the Church, which had been shaped to the needs of the apostolate in the old societies, no longer sufficed for the new. New instruments, new methods had to be found to reach the proietarianised masses. If the Faith was to survive amongst those masses, it must be preached to them anew. And preached in places and amongst men to whom the priests of the Church no longer found access. The priest cannot go into the mine, the factory, the office, the store, to work and live amongst the people as he had been able to work and live amongst them in the communities of a simpler world. So the apostolic task has come, with new emphasis, to the laity who are already living and working amongst the peoples of the mines, the factories, the offices, the exchanges and marts, and all the provinces of a secularised society…
Catholic Action is an apostolate. Its end is to win men to Christ as men were won to Christ by Peter and Paul. It is a social apostolate. It seeks to restore right order in society, to recreate society. But its action is not political. The breaking societies of the West cannot be renewed by political or economic panaceas. It is a moral sickness from which the body of society suffers, and it will not be cured by local plasters upon local symptoms. Politics, economics, are phases of human behaviour, but human behaviour is inevitably determined by the values which men hold, by their sense of right and wrong. The social crisis and its economic and political manifestations are effects of wrong values, of the long confusion of right and wrong. It is the task of Catholic Action to restore in men the values of Christ, the meanings of Christ: to set society right by setting right the men who compose society. As Catholic Action grows, as it restores the Christian community, the bond of charity finds active expression in the institutions and organisations which proceed from Catholic Action…
Paul McGuire and John Fitzsimons, The world scene of Catholic Action.
SEE
How do I see this?
The priest cannot go into the mine, the factory, the office, the store, to work and live amongst the people as he had been able to work and live amongst them in the communities of a simpler world. So the apostolic task has come, with new emphasis, to the laity who are already living and working amongst the peoples of the mines, the factories, the offices, the exchanges and marts, and all the provinces of a secularised society
Paul McGuire and John Fitzsimons, The world scene of Catholic Action.
JUDGE
Do I believe this?
Catholic Action is a mission to men and women. It seeks to extend to them the meaning, the peace, the order of Christ our Lord, so that all things may be restored in Him
Paul McGuire and John Fitzsimons, The world scene of Catholic Action.
ACT
What can I do today to transform the Australian milieu?