The Young Christian Workers’ Movement Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum was the first papal encyclical to address the workaday world of capital and labour. It criticised ‘the hard-heartedness of employers and the greed of unchecked competition’. Michael Morton looks at the history of the Young Christian Workers’ Movement that resulted from this initiative.
In 1891 Pope Leo XIII wrote an encyclical letter called Rerum novarum, which considered the relationship between capital and labour and their corresponding rights and duties. Previously, the Catholic Church had not had a good nineteenth century. It had surrendered much of the influence it had wielded at the Congress of Vienna in 1815 by refusing to accommodate itself to the political and social changes that took place in a new industrial Europe. The long pontificate of Pope Pius IX (1846-78) was really a protracted rearguard action against modernity. His successor, Leo XIII, realised that even if he could not influence governments he could appeal directly to the good will of Catholic people about the justice of wages, conditions of work and private property. The encyclical was actually the first occasion on which a major church figure had explored this association between capital and labour and represented the beginning of a critique of capitalist individualism by the Church in Europe. Pope Leo criticised ‘the hardheartedness of employers and the greed of unchecked competition’. He was equally unhappy about the ‘pleasant dreams’ of socialism, which would in reality mean the ‘levelling down of all to a like condition of misery and degradation’. Rerum novarum looks forward to a society spontaneously organised into charitable, co-operative and trade associations. Only thus, it argues, can social justice be reconciled with individual freedom. For all its subtlety and depth, however, Catholic social philosophy did not fare well in the 20th century as it lost ground to more militant socialist rivals. Yet Leo XIII’s reflection on the world of work was to have surprising results thanks to the innovative work of a radical young priest, Fr Joseph Cardijn, who founded the Young Christian Workers’ movement.
Cardijn was born in Brussels in 1885, but moved out to Hal, a Flemish borough some sixteen kilometres from Brussels itself. In the 1890s Hal was far from picturesque. The factories opened at four or five in the morning, and the workers had to endure harsh conditions. For example, the use of ether in the manufacture of artificial silk at Tubize nearby left the work force in a state of semi-stupor. Cardijn’s own family were coal merchants and until he was 14 young Joseph helped out by running errands for his father. Then when he finished school, Cardijn left for the diocesan seminary at Malines to study for the priesthood. But on returning home for the holidays he was surprised and mortified to discover that his friends from school now considered him to have joined the enemy. They saw the young seminarist as having taken his place on the side of the capitalists and employers. They had to go into the mines, the factories and the shops to earn a hard living; by contrast, the seminarians lived comparatively easy lives and were given generous holidays. Cardijn never forget this shock of discovery, nor did he easily recover from another when his father died when he was only 21 years old. He had come to realise what it had cost his parents to allow him to enter the seminary. It proved to be an event that affected him deeply. Soon to be ordained, he carried these influences of his early life always: his origins among the working-class, his experience of his first vacation from seminary and an appreciation of his father’s sacrifices to send him there.
In 1913, after ordination Cardijn was appointed to Laecken church in Brussels. At once his pastoral style was seen to be very distinctive because of his exposure to the lives and hardships of working people. Like them he saw Christian faith as having to do with involvement and action in daily life. Cardijn had amongst his duties the chaplaincy to a parish girls’ youth group - a small and not very active association that largely provided a chaperoned place for boys and girls to meet plus a forum for some Cardijn saw Christian faith as having to do with involvement and action in daily life... angered employers who called him a communist. modest amateur dramatics. Most of the girls who came worked as seamstresses, and soon Cardijn began to enquire closely into their working conditions. Within twelve months he had started a Women’s Christian Workers’ League which had over 1000 members. Such a foundation angered the employers who called Cardijn a communist. After the war, in 1919, he started ‘Young Trades Unionists’ group which was the testing ground for the Review of Life which he developed more fully later on.
However, this also brought conflict because Belgium was still in the comparatively early stages of an industrial revolution and feared Trades Unions. What is more, as far as the Church was concerned, social work meant works of charity. These were dependent upon the financial support of employers and the wealthy and naturally the Church did not wish to offend them. Yet Cardijn was adamant that his groups of young workers were not just for putting on Christmas plays, learning to pray, discussing theology and going out socially. They were talking about their experience and their lives. They were taking action to build a Christian society. Sometimes the action meant reforming their own action in life; sometimes they looked and saw that the social structures of the system were wrong. They worked for social change, always challenging to put things right. Employers were angry, and church people afraid.
At that time, the Belgian Catholic Youth Association (BCYA) was run by chaplains and intellectuals. They wanted the Young Trades Unionists to become a part of the BCYA, but Cardijn wanted autonomy. It is something that the YCW strives for still. He did not wish to be affiliated with the bourgeois, middle-class youth who met to provide Christian and spiritual protection for their members against the dangers of the world. So Cardijn’s group became the YCW, and was almost immediately suppressed. In reply, Cardijn went to Rome and in a famous incident in the Vatican Palace, he accidentally found his way into the presence of Pope Pius XI to whom he made his case for a young workers’ movement. Pius listened to him for some time and then apparently exclaimed that ‘this man speaks to me of the masses’. In any event he gave official approval to the YCW movement, and the date, April 1925, marks the birth of the YCW under the patronage of St Joseph the Worker.
These events still find some echoes in the Church of today. Not just in the attitude of church authorities to the world of work but in the fact that young people with courage and common sense can enable movements like the YCW to happen. For it is always their movement. The chaplain or animator only accompanies and never controls or directs the workers. Eighty years later, the name of the YCW might appear to be an anachronism. At the time, ‘Christian’ rather than ‘Catholic’ was radical and tolerant, but now it is often synonymous with fundamentalist, evangelical. The notion of workers and the ‘working class’ also sounds somewhat dated.
Many would declare the working class extinct in the West. However, a more relevant line of inquiry is one that investigates the nature of work itself. Work for us is related to earning money and status. If you ask someone ‘what work do you do?’, it is a primary, defining question. In fact, to discover someone does no work is an important piece of information about them too. YCW The defines work like this: ‘human work is any human activity at all where a person uses their creative mind and their body to take hold of the world around them, to transform it, to use it and make it usable for society’.
Now that global capitalism has appeared as a dominant ideology, people are receiving the message that they are powerless and cannot even aspire to that. They have become a commodity, less important than goods. The YCW would ask, what factors have caused this situation? We need to look or investigate in order to find out. In his own time, Cardijn developed the method of SEE – JUDGE – ACT, a process that he termed the Review of Life (ROL). It was based on what Cardijn called the three truths:
The Truth of Faith, the Truth of Method and the Truth of Reality. These change with the times, so that the Truth of Reality for the early 21st century is very different from that of Flanders around 1900. In our world, industrial production seems on the way out, along with the proletariat here in the West. Socialism has not become superfluous because the system has changed: it is out of favour because the system is all the more intensively what it had been before.
Socialism has declined because the system looks so Socialism has declined because the system looks so hard to beat, something that has caused many to despair of radical change.
FormerYCW President Ricky Davies with KenyaYCW team hard to beat, something that has caused many to despair of radical change. But Cardijn did not believe that people cannot do anything about anything important. He was a near-contemporary of Lenin and the Russian revolutionaries and like them he maintained that there was a need to create a small group of trained ‘militants’ who would make things happen. He was no determinist waiting on events, and he even used the same colours as the Soviets on the YCW badge – red and gold with a cross and an ear of wheat instead of a hammer and sickle.
Cardijn’s Truth of Method has not changed substantially, nor needed to. His group would ‘see’ - that is to say, study a question and in the context of Christian faith, for daily life is a sacred place and formative action is a response to God. With the facts comes the need for reflection. Cardijn favoured the Synoptic Gospels where the talk of the Kingdom was an idea that appealed to his radical politics and his vision of primary Christianity.
The YCW said, in effect, we see, we experience the reality and we can understand and judge it so that we can move into effective action, either individually or as a group.
The use of the ROL shows other characteristics of the YCW group.
The group is disciplined, to begin with. It has order, and an elected president who chairs the discussion. (It will also have a treasurer and secretary who notes down action.) The chaplain does not lead but contributes when asked. But he will have met the president before the group session to discuss what needs to be brought up. The agenda for the meeting is simply ‘facts of the week’, that is things that have happened to the members of the YCW and they are dealt with through the truths of reality, method and faith.
The YCW and the ROL have a noticeable seriousness of purpose. The action that results has some specific characteristics, too. It need to be challenging, confronting in some cases. It also need to be worthwhile, doing something visible which makes a difference. In addition, it is not too difficult (like changing the world, or making poverty history) but is often a step forward that will lead on to more action.
One of the issues was the place of the Catholic Church in the movement and even of Christian faith itself. Yet if it is true to the origins of the vision of Cardijn, the YCW movement will possess these ten characteristics in balance: That it is YOUNG, CHRISTIAN and for the WORKING CLASS. It SERVES, EDUCATES, TRAINS and REPRESENTS. It is ORGANISED into GROUPS and is a MASS movement.
Fr Joseph Cardijn’s world was Catholic, his young people were not mobile and many of them were factory workers. Today, that is not the case for the majority. We live in an age that has witnessed the waning of western Christianity wherein the Church actually seems to be opting for slow decline rather than anything else which might affect the status and control of those in charge. Reforms following Vatican II in 1965 when the church was stripped of its harsher mediaeval doctrines and based on the neighbourhood and the Eucharist now appear largely to have failed. Parishes have tended to become religious social clubs, reverting to the style of Cardijn’s Catholic Girls in Laecken in 1913.
In one way, the governance of the Church cannot always put forward a credible and attractive picture of the religious life, for it is really quite modest as religious faith. The YCW is a movement that represents the beginning of a kind of nonecclesial Christian faith. It finds its own starting-point in different individuals and places, it moves forward as way of life and of living. During the 100 years up to the 1980s, the Church invested heavily in buildings - churches, schools, halls and clubs. It produced a sort of fixed defence which has still to be staffed and maintained, often expensively. The YCW, by contrast, needs very little money to function, it is fluid and can meet anywhere. It is Christianity showing in reality what is only heard as a faint echo in the teaching of Jesus about the coming of the Kingdom.
The nature of the YCW as united but diverse is to be seen in the activity of the movement itself. If YCW were a youth club, you could say that it meets regularly and does certain things and everyone has a good time. If it were a philosophy or a political idea, you could say here is a book or leaflet and if you read it you will discover all about the YCW movement. If it were a prayer group or a study group, you could say that its aims would be self-evident. If it were social action you could say here are the issues, this is how we are confronting them. If it were a charitable organisation then you could measure its success by the work carried out and goals achieved. But YCW is a movement that contains aspects of all these even though it cannot be identified with any one. It is worldwide, its values often endure in people for life.