(The Editors, i.e. Paul McGuire and John Fitzsimons
Catholic Action is in
being.
Its task is essentially
the task of the apostolate. It teaches all nations. In all nations
now it moves. In some there appear its first social effects. One may
see the beginnings, here and there, of a new Christian commonwealth.
That transformation of society for which the Holy Father pleaded,
begins. This book is less a study of the principles of Catholic
Action (for these, there is Civardi's admirable Manual of Catholic
Action) than of Catholic Action in being, of the experience of
Catholic Action.
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.
The phrase Catholic
Action has been widely abused, even amongst Catholics. It is not
political action, it is not economic action, it is not merely an
intensification of the devotional life. It is the action of the
Church on the world. And it marches.
Consider one instance.
In the years immediately
after the World War, the Christian position throughout the industrial
provinces of Belgium appeared desperate. The age-old Christian life
and culture of the Belgians was being submerged in urban
industrialism. The conditions of life and work were appalling. The
old social ties that had held men to the Church were dissolving, and
it hardly seemed possible that Christian virtue could survive in that
environment. It was estimated that nine in ten of the children who
went into the mines and the mills were lost to the Faith within a few
months.
Three men decided to act.
A young priest and two young laymen, workers, came together. They
made up their minds that they would live their Faith and put it into
practice in their families, among their friends; that they would
conquer themselves, conquer their families, conquer their comrades of
the factories, conquer all their comrades of the working-class,
conquer Belgium, conquer for Christ.
They are doing it.
There were three of them.
In 1920, there were two hundred of them. In 1925, six hundred
delegates from branches of the organisation they had founded attended
their Brussels Congress. In 1930, there were six thousand delegates
at Namur. In 1937, more than eighty thousand young men and women of
the working-classes, all under twenty-five years of age,
representatives of their comrades in the factories, the mines, and
the mills of twenty-four different countries, came to their Paris
Congress.
That
is the Jeunesse Ouvrière Chrétienne,
J. O. C., the Young Christian Workers. It is one phase of Catholic
Action. It is the workers' division of the youth section of Catholic
Action. It is raising the Cross in the most sordid and dehumanised of
all man's battlefields. It promises even to transform that grey,
bitter world into which the masses of men-made proletarians have
sunk. Deep in the coal-mine with us works Christ our King proclaim
the great banners of the Flemish miners. He and they are transforming
that world in which the industrialised masses were trapped, that
soured, pitiless world of the mills and the mines and the factories.
For even there, grace will work with men who co-operate with grace.
Catholic Action has
existed since that moment when our Lord gave a Mission to His first
Apostles. Catholic Action, as we understand it to-day, is not a new
thing, but a new technique, a new method of approach to the people of
a changed world.
It is a reinsistence, a
reaffirmation, of the laymen's part in the hierarchical apostolate of
the Church. The Church, the whole Church, is to teach all nations.
The layman to-day is reminded of his part in that charge and mission.
It is plain that the
methods which served in the old, pre-industrial societies cannot
serve the needs of this new world into which we have come, this world
of huge, teeming populations, of vast new barracks-cities, of
fantastic wealth and even more fantastic poverty, this world has
destroyed the old traditions and the settled ways of life, which has
wrenched men away from the old close-knit communities in which they
found some measure of social and economic security, which has thrown
them into a social and economic and moral maelstrom. For the masses
of the industrial countries (and almost all countries are now
industrialised) the whole shape of life has changed. There has never
been so abrupt and remorseless a change in all human history. Even
now, we are only beginning to understand the effects on men's minds
and morals of that change.
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.
The great co-operative organisations of the Belgian peasants and the
Belgian working men, the Boerenbond and the League of Christian
Workers, with their community services for education, for banking,
for assurance, for buying, for selling, are social effects of
Catholic Action. They point the way to a new social order; they are,
obviously, the beginnings of a new Christian social order, but they
are to be seen as effects, not as the particular end of Catholic
Action. Catholic Action restores society by converting it to Christ
... it restores all things in Him.
How else are they to be
restored?
In every part of the
world it seeks to extend the Kingdom of Christ. Nowhere yet has it
achieved its mature forms. It is in process of formation, of
development. It is not a piece of machinery which can be erected
here, there, and anywhere by a process of manufacture, to the design
of a blueprint. Catholic Action belongs to life. It is a thing that
grows. What is growing is a new community, a new society, a Christian
society. This chapter describes it in growth and the experience of
growth.
In some places and
amongst some peoples it is more advanced; it grows faster than
amongst others. We have given particular attention in the body of the
book to the more advanced forms of Catholic Action in their national
structures and in the life of their units, because we believe that
the experiences of the advanced forms will have lessons for the less
advanced. Though each country must find its own best local methods,
it is apparent that certain experiences are likely to recur in
Catholic Action everywhere: these deserve universal attention. In the
search for right methods, the right technique, the experience of
those who have formed their methods and technique is constantly
suggestive and useful. We have been concerned to describe certain
achieved models here.
Each
country, each milieu, each local group must modify its methods and
ultimately shape its technique and its organisations according to its
own needs, its native temperament and traditions, its human climate.
But each, of course, will adhere to the fundamental principles of
Catholic Action which are common just as the Faith and Order of the
Church are common. There is Catholic unity. There is also diversity
according to the local needs of men.
There is an obvious
diversity, for instance, in the circumstances of men even within a
single parish. There will be men who work in factories, artisans,
labourers, transport workers, students, the middle classes, men who
employ, men who are employed. Each of these men is to be an apostle
in his own milieu, to his fellows in the factory, the office, the
running-sheds, the schools; with each there will be different
problems to solve, different methods to use. In the advanced forms of
Catholic Action there is need for specialisation, determined by the
milieu, the environment of the apostolate.
The principle of
specialisation indeed is implied in the most elementary forms of
Catholic Action. There is Catholic Action for men, Catholic Action
for women, Catholic Action for young men, Catholic Action for young
women. The differences of age and sex are immediately recognised.
Further, the Holy Father has indicated the need for specialisation
according to vocation when he has said that the apostle to the
working-man must be the working-man, to the employer the employer.
This is not an emphasis
upon differences in economic and social status. It does not confirm
class-divisions. It recognises the fact of these differences, and its
influence in the work of conversion, and it recalls to each man his
responsibility to those about him. The employer has no familiar
understanding of the workers' milieu, and he has neither the
opportunity nor the experience to make a successful apostolate in it.
Similarly, the worker is hardly likely to bring Christ to the
employers. He is not himself one of them. The underlying principle of
specialisation is this: if the world is to be won for Christ, then
each one of us must strive to win his own little world, the world of
his daily communications and intercourse. He must win himself, he
must win his family, he must win the men and women with whom he is,
day by day, in association: the people he works with, plays with,
eats with, travels with, all his little world. If each Catholic is
winning his own little world then the whole world is being won. And
how else can it be won?
So far from this
specialised action confirming class distinctions, it is, in fact, the
one way to overcome them: for as each class grows in knowledge and
understanding of a Faith made common to all classes, so the common
obligations are stressed and enforced with common sanctions. Catholic
Action is theologically based on the doctrine of the Mystical Body:
we are members, one of another. It is only in the realisation of that
transcendent fellowship that the true social unity may be achieved.
For the diversity of men,
diversity of methods; but it is a variety in unity.
The layman possesses a
part in the hierarchy of the Church, but his action in the apostolate
depends upon a specific mandate from his Bishop. Everywhere, Catholic
Action is dependent upon and subject to the Bishop. It normally
possesses a parochial basis, but it is sometimes, when circumstances
require, organised upon a diocesan basis. Of the six divisions of
Catholic Action in Italy, Catholic Action for men, for women, for
young men, for young women, for men University students and for women
University students, the first four are organised on the basis of
parochial sections; but the fifth and the sixth are organised on the
basis of diocesan sections. Circumstances everywhere must determine
the order, and the Bishop is always the judge of circumstances, the
giver of order.
When one turns to the
whole world-scene, one finds considerable local variations within the
defined frame; and it is well to recall that hardly anywhere has a
completed structure as yet appeared. Catholic Action, one repeats, is
an affair of growth, belonging to life. Its growth is ordered, its
final form is determined; but the stages of its growth vary from
place to place and according to the local human climate. Even in
Belgium, where the general structure is more elaborated than in any
other country, a Central National Council, the crown of the pyramid,
is not yet created; while in the United States, it has been found
necessary to establish a central national executive, a National
Conference of Catholic Welfare, with its National Councils of
Catholic Men and of Catholic Women, before the subordinate
organisations are much developed. The vast extent and the variety of
the American scene imposed this need for a central clearing-house and
bureau: in the narrower stage of Belgium, where each organisation is
in frequent association, formal co-ordination has not yet been found
urgent.
Growth, development
according to need, has been the governing principle everywhere.
Mercantile Liverpool is one problem; a Vicariate in Uganda is
another. In both the end is to establish the reign of Christ: the
methods must vary.
All societies to-day are
in dissolution. In China, India, Africa, as well as in Europe and the
Americas, the impact of the modern spirit, armed with modern
ideologies and modern techniques, has been decisive. Even the
immemorial civilisations of China and India are breaking under that
alien blow.
Societies and cultures
break, but societies and cultures are born. It is natural and
necessary for men to live in community, and communities are informed
by the values which prevail amongst their members. This is at once an
age of heroic dangers and of hcroic opportunities for the Christian.
For, if the old Christendom is disappearing, he has the task to shape
new Christendoms throughout the whole world. It is his task in
Catholic Action.
It requires an heroic
temper in him. At Brussels, in the black winter dawns, one may see
the young workmen and the young working girls coming each morning, in
their overalls, to Mass; before they go to their factories and their
shops and their mills, they receive Christ in the Eucharist, to carry
Him with them into that bitterly drab, dehumanised life of theirs
which He and they are fighting to transform. One can hear them answer
the priest in the dialogue of the Mass. The liturgy, the social
prayer of the Church, is the soul of their social movement, as it
must be the the soul of all Catholic Action. And in Holland^ on some
nights of the year, one may see the girls of the Grail, which is the
Dutch Catholic Action for young women, walking two by two, in every
street of every village and town and city, praying for the people who
live in the houses of the streets. And in Paris, in those industrial
suburbs that were lately the most anti-Christian corner of Europe,
one may see the League of Christian Workers, founded only two years
ago from boys and girls of the J.O.C. who had married. Because they
are married, and because a man and his wife are one, they conceive
the family as the militant unit of Catholic Action. In their first
eighteen months, each of the original Jocist families has converted
on an average four other families. If we can conceive the Christian
courage and resolution which these working-class families possess,
then we can understand what is required of us all.
This is the temper of
Catholic Action.
Catholic Action is in
being, literally, from China to Peru. In one place, as we have said,
it is more advanced than in another. In one place appears the
beginning of a new Christian social order. In another, one sees but
the first movements of the mind, the imagination and the will. But no
great social movement in all history has grown as this is growing.
One may see in it the fact of our time most charged with significance
for the future.
We have not, within the
limits of this book, hoped to picture the whole world-scene. We have
given individual chapters to the development of Catholic Action in
three European countries, those in which the forms seem most
developed; but the world at large is beyond our scope.
Nevertheless, in this
chapter we may glance here and there, both for the sake of the whole
impression and to recognise those local variations which reveal the
flexibility of Catholic Action.
The essential structure
of Catholic Action appears with a kind of classic simplicity in
Polish Catholic Action. There are four national federations, of men,
of women, of young men, and of young women, co-ordinated in the
parish by Parish Catholic Action, in the diocese by the Diocesan
Institute, and in the nation by the Central Institute. The Central
Institute has a general direction of the Diocesan Institutes, and the
Diocesan Institutes have a general direction of the Parish Catholic
Action Councils. Each National Federation, in the matters proper to
it, directs its own Diocesan Leagues (also affiliated to the Diocesan
Institutes), and its Diocesan Leagues direct their Parish
Associations (also affiliated to the Parish Council). There is thus a
twofold coordination of all the constituents: through the new
national federations and through the ecclesiastical organisation of
diocese and parish.
This may be taken as a
typical structure for national Catholic Action. It is as yet far from
achieved in every country, though some, like Italy, have elaborated
it.
How does this Polish
organization function?
Throughout all the
National Federations there is, each year, a national programme
provided by the Bishops: e.g., for the sanctification of the family,
the education of the family, the reign of Christ in the schools.
Within the Parish
Associations, active campaigns of formation are constantly developed.
Each Association meets at least every second or third week, to study
Catholic Action, to organise social activities, to intensify
religious life, with monthly Communions and with retreats. Parochial
houses for Catholic Action are established, with libraries. In the
young men's associations, particular attention is given to their
formation for the rural life, and (since service is inevitable) for
their military life.
The Diocesan Institutes
provide special courses for the priests in Catholic Action, and each
year the Diocesan Leagues reassemble in a Eucharistic Congress.
The Central Institute
directs the national campaigns of the year, convenes the national
conferences, produces the necessary literature, acts, in brief, as a
General Staff to the whole movement.
Catholic Action in China
has had its formal development in the reign of the present Pontiff;
but, as early as 1912, the Unio Actionis Catholicae Sinarum had been
established, with general headquarters in Tientsin, with a first
branch at Shanghai under the leadership of Mr. Lo Pa Hong, later to
be President-General of Catholic Action in China (the great Catholic
layman who was murdered in 1937 as he went on one of his countless
errands of charity). With him was associated Mr. Tsu, brother of
Bishop Simon Tsu. Within a year, branches were spreading throughout
the interior missions, especially in those of Shansi Province.
During
its first period, Chinese Catholic Action was especially concerned to
resist the proposals to establish Confucianism as the national
religion and as the basis of national education.
It is distinctly worth
noticing that this first development of Chinese Catholic Action was
prompted by Chinese priests, eminently Father Philip Wang and Father
Peter Tch'eng.
The second phase of
Chinese Catholic Action opened in 1928, when the Holy Father
congratulated the Chinese people on their unification, recognised the
Nanking Government, and urged the faithful to develop in Catholic
Action their service to their Church and their country.
An immediate impetus was
given. National headquarters were established in Peiping, and in
1929, the National Council of Catholic Young Men and the National
Council of Catholic Women were established, and a Review of Catholic
Action was founded.
The invasion of Manchuria
and the troubles of those years inevitably interfered with the normal
development of Catholic Action, but the work of formation went
steadily on; and on the first day of 1934, Catholic Action entered
upon its formal life with the proclamation of the General Statutes of
Chinese Catholic Action. They had been approved in Rome by the
Congregation of Propaganda Fide the previous month. Father Paul
Yupin, then teaching at Propaganda College in Rome, returned to China
to become Director-General of Catholic Action and Bishop of Nanking.
Social Weeks were at once organized for the studies of lay-leaden,
and courses of study were organised throughout the provinces. The
Catholic press of China was reformed, enlarged, and new periodicals
were founded. There was an immediate multiplication of diocesan and
parish councils. A Catholic Action Week was organised at Hankow in
October, 1934, which closed with a great Eucharistic procession.
Catholic Action Weeks are something of a feature of the Chinese
movement. A remarkable one was held in Canton in 1937.
The National Catholic
Action Congress at Shanghai in September, 1935, attended by delegates
from every part of China, marks a stage in the Church's advance. At
this Congress, Lo Pa Hong reviewed the work of Catholic Action in the
city and district of Shanghai. Fourteen hundred and thirty-five
meetings had been held for pagans, and more than seven hundred
thousand of them had come to listen. Fourteen thousand meetings had
been held for catechumens, and six hundred and thirty-two thousand
had been instructed. Members of the Catholic Action Association had
themselves baptised two hundred and seventy thousands of people.
Chinese Catholic Action
is in five divisions, under the General Council of Catholic Action in
all China. The Men's Division is organised in national, diocesan, and
parochial councils. The Young Men's Division is similarly organised
and adds to the structure its Council of University Youth, while from
its various sections depend the sections of the Diocesan Boys'
Associations and the Young Men's Study and Gymnastic Associations, as
auxiliaries of Catholic Action. The Women and the Girls' Division
includes the Women University Students, and the Young Women's Study
and Gymnastic Associations. The National Study Associations depend
directly on the Apostolic Delegate through the Central Council. The
Associations for Social Works are organised in cach diocese under the
Diocesan Councils. The structure, on the whole, closely resembles the
Italian structure, but there is a special emphasis on social works:
for in social works is manifested the bond of charity, and in charity
is the way of conversion. In 1937, Chinese Catholic Action had one
hundred thousand members, many of them trained catechists who go out
amongst the people in their week-ends, to the villages, the
hospitals, the prisons.
Chinese Catholic Action
is organised for three major activities: (1) Christian Formation of
the members of Catholic Action; (2) Missionary Activity amongst the
Pagan Population; (3) Social Activity.
Under Social Activity are
included: (1) Christian Education by the foundation of Catholic
educational institutions and by scholarships for poor students; (2)
the practice of Charity (in Shanghai, for instance, there are eight
large Catholic hospitals, nineteen dispensaries, four orphanages, one
the largest in China, two homes for the aged, one mental hospital;
and resources available for immediate relief in times of flood,
famine, pestilence); (3) defence of the rights of the Church, of
freedom of conscience, of religious education; (4) to promote
Catholic co-operation in the reconstruction of the State and in the
promotion of right social order. Catholic Action has been consulted
by the Government, and it has given assistance proper to its
responsibility as an element in China's life; (5) to promote a
Catholic Action Press (e.g., the Official Bulletins of the different
Divisions of Catholic Action and a Review of Catholic Culture which
circulates widely amongst all the intellectual classes of China).
How far all this work is
interrupted by the chaos into which China has been lately thrown it
is difficult to know, but the temper of Chinese Catholic Action
promises a harvest in those white fields.
Catholic
Action in Peru has developed chiefly from the existing organisations,
the sodalities and the confraternities and the organisations of men
and of women, as it has in Brazil and Venezuela. In Brazil now appear
the specialised youth organisations ; Young Christian Workers and
Young Christian Students and Young Christian Bourgeoisie, influenced
by the Belgian models of the Jeunesse
Ouvière Chrétienne and the Jeunesse
Etudiante Chrétienne and the Jeunesse
Indépendante Chrétienne / these are
spreading in most of the South American countries, as they are in the
motherlands, Portugal and Spain.
The
Argentine and Chile have the basic structure in their Associacions
National de Hombres
Catolicos, Liga de Damas Catolicos,
Liga de la
Juventud Femenina Catolica, Federation de
la Juventud Catolica.
In each of these, and in
all the South American countries, Catholic Action is in formation
(as, indeed, it is everywhere). The problems of distance, of race, of
the varying levels of cultural life in countries like the Argentine
are, of course, tremendous ; remote rural dioceses have needs and
circumstances quite other than those of the great urban centres; but
the Junta National is graduallyextending
its campaigns in the far Andean lands and in the great pastures of
the centre and south.
South America is a
special challenge to Catholic Action; it is a continent of the
future, and it is a continent which has been frighteningly neglected
in the past. Bolivia, for instance, with a population seventy per
cent Indian has practically no religious instruction. It has one
priest to twenty-five thousand of its inhabitants. Legislation has
encouraged divorce and the breaking-up of the old family life. On the
evidence of other countries, we may expect Catholic Action to produce
a special virility here, for it succeeds most where the case is most
desperate.
India has four million
Catholics in its population of three hundred and eighty millions. In
India, as in China, the harvest is white, if there were the reapers.
It has been agreed that the Church in India could at once employ five
thousand more priests, within its existing organisation and for its
present members, if the priests were available. This situation
obviously calls for the immediate and active co-operation of the
laity with the clergy in the apostolate.
Since it was established
in 1930, the All India Catholic League has organised annually the All
India Catholic Congresses. These consider the major themes of India's
life: the problems of the depressed classes, of the family, the
propagation of Catholic principles in the Indian situation to the
various castes, the contribution of Catholics to civic and social
life. The League promotes study- weeks in the different provinces,
and it seems to offer the framework for a national Catholic
organisation; it is the one Pan-Indian
movement amongst Catholics, and it reveals, in Archbishop Goodier's
words, "a common life in the Catholic Church in India which
becomes more manifest every year".
In Malabar and Madras the
Federation of Young Men of India is essentially an organisation of
education for Catholic Action, with its weekly study-circles, each
with a maximum membership of twelve. The groups are appearing, too,
in Bangalore.
In 1937 the Bishops of
the Province of Calcutta announced a scheme for Catholic Action. "We
came to the conclusion," says the Archbishop of Calcutta in his
Pastoral of April 14th, 1937, "that the solid basis of Catholic
Action ought to be laid in our schools; and we unanimously decided to
draw up a plan according to which our Catholic Youth should be
prepared for their future apostolate."
The students in each
school are divided into three sections, Senior, Middle, and Junior.
Each Section is composed of Circles of six to ten members. Each
Circle has its Leader, drawn from students who have had some previous
preparation in the Sodality, and who have been given some preliminary
formation. He becomes the President, and each Circle also has its
Secretary, its Treasurer, and a Moderator recruited from the school
staff. A suitable meeting-room and a library is provided, and each
Circle meets at least twice a month, but preferably each week.
A
systematic programme of spiritual, intellectual, and social formation
has been provided for each section.
This work in the schools
may be called Pre-Catholic Action. Catholic Action itself in the
Province of Calcutta is co-ordinated and directed by the Catholic
Association, with a development of the Circle method throughout the
Parochial groups and such extra-Parochial groups as the vocational
organisations, the teachers, the nurses, the stenographers,
shop-assistants, clerks, and workmen.
The Parochial groups are
to co-operate in catechetical work, in recovering the lapsed, in
disseminating literature and forming libraries, in study clubs, in
work for the Missions, in aiding conversions, in the works of mercy,
in making parish census, in liturgical action, in the extension of
education, in Church Extension, in the Legion of Decency, and "in
all works whatsoever of a spiritual nature for the love and glory of
God and for the help and enlightenment of ourselves and our
neighbour.
The extra-Parochial
groups are, of course, concerned with the special problems and
opportunities of their vocations.
In Ceylon, the Catholics
are about one-tenth of the population. Ceylon has grown towards
Catholic Action with remarkable effect in recent years. The Catholic
Union of Ceylon co-ordinates the Diocesan Unions. Nearly every parish
has its youth organisations for young men and young women; many
parishes have study- circles and libraries. Vocational groups have
been organised; the Post and Telegraph Catholic Association, the
Colombo Workers' Union, the Columbia Municipality Catholic Guild, the
Catholic University Students' Union, for instance.
The Catholic Social Guild
of Ceylon was formed in 1936. Its organ Social Justice (remarkable
for its survey of the problem of poverty in Ceylon) has a circulation
of 73,000 in the Singalese edition, and of 36,000 in the English. Its
campaigns by radio, lectures and debate, by the dissemination of
series of leaflets in all three languages of the islands, are
tireless. It has promoted a campaign for the living wage and for
better housing; it has co-operated with Government in a
land-settlement scheme; it has actively supported the Fishermen's
Welfare Unions; it has founded Workers' Rest-Houses. It has insisted
always on an integral Catholicism as the one ultimate and certain
solution of the social problem; it has recognised that Christianity
may be preached in good works as well as in good words.
In Japan, too, the thing
appears. In many dioceses, youth activities have been federated, with
weekly study- circles on religious evidences, with annual study-weeks
on the cultural problems, and with an annual retreat. No general
organisation for men yet exists, but vocational groups are formed
throughout the country. Thus, there is an Association of Catholic
Artists (much is hoped in Japan from a "cultural"
apostolate). Nippon Shimaika (the Association of Sisters) gives
formation to women for Catholic Action. Ake no hoshi (the Morning
Star) is chiefly concerned with social works.
In 1930 a Central Office
of Catholic Information was established, and it now publishes one
weekly and three reviews. Particular attention is given in Japan to
the Apostolate of the Press. Throughout the country, groups of
students are organised to propagate it in their areas.
In Asia and in Africa,
Catholic Action is in its formative stages, but everywhere the
essential temper begins to appear. In South Africa, the Catholic
African Union was founded in 1927, as a federation of the Catholic
Farmers' Union, the Catholic Women's Association, the Catholic Young
Men's Association, and the Catholic Teachers' Union. It is
essentially concerned at this stage with the formation of leaders,
the study of the Church's social doctrine, and the development of a
specialised action, the apostolate of like to like for the spiritual
conquest of each social milieu. It is very well worth notice that it
provides a common ground for blacks and whites, and is breaking the
old prejudices by meetings in common.
In the missionary
provinces of Africa, the problems have their own peculiar flavour.
Thus, in East Africa, where the Bishops have adopted a scheme already
working in Shire, leaders are selected in each native village, who
are especially charged with the care of their fellows. They lead the
villagers in daily public prayer, they are active in social
education, in promoting hygiene, and occasionally they are charged to
administer mild fraternal corrections. They settle domestic
difficulties, and they are active to defend the traditional family
and village life. These laymen are often remote from their priests,
but each Sunday the leaders of neighbouring villages gather under a
district president for their own formation; and each visit of the
missioner is a period of vigorous training for the black militants of
East African Catholic Action.
In Uganda, the leaders
are brought together each year for a period of retreat and of study
under the Bishop. In West Africa, Dahomey has set up Catholic Action.
Committees for Catholic Action have been elected at each
mission-station, whose work is to co-ordinate and control and help
all the existing activities: the Catholic Mothers and the Catholic
Youth, for instance.
Amongst the native
populations of French North Africa, organisations like the J.O.C. and
the J.O.C.F. (the Young Christian Workers) form an integral part of
the French J.O.C. and the French J.O.C.F.
In this book it will be
noticed that we insist on the social nature of Catholic Action, upon
its influence on the life of communities. This element is of especial
importance in Africa, in that tribal culture which prevails almost
everywhere amongst the negro peoples. Thus, the Vicar-Apostolic of
Dahomey has written:
"This form of
organisation (the parish structure) is needed in Africa more than
elsewhere, because an individual when outside a group counts for
little."
Where the traditional
community survives, as it does in many parts of Africa, Catholic
Action seeks to preserve its proper strength and its characteristic
culture. Where, as in most parts of our western world, the
traditional Christian community has been broken, it is the task of
Catholic Action to restore a true community, because "an
individual when outside a group counts for little."
In Europe, the
traditional communities survive chiefly amongst the peasant peoples
of the centre and the east. Here, on the eastern marches of Europe,
the conflicts between the Eastern civilisations and the West have
surged for a thousand years; and now, too, they experience the crisis
and conflict of old and new.
Poland is, in many
senses, the country most remote in Europe from that
liberal-capitalistic mentality which gives its characteristic tone to
the western countries. The influence of the French Revolution did not
much penetrate there. It is a country of patriarchal manners.
Catholicism is the religion of the State. It has two chief
avocations: agriculture and the army. The influence of the
Reformation has been eliminated from the national life. She stands,
Europe's bastion, against that dark tide in the east, where the Third
Byzantium has risen against Christ.
Three-fourths of her
people are Catholics, but of five rites: Byzantine, Slav, Armenian,
Greek Catholic and Latin. Catholic Action was first organised amongst
the Latins in 1923. In 1926, it was extended to the whole country. In
1929, its study was made obligatory in all seminaries. In 1930, the
Central Institute of Catholic Action for all Poland was set up at
Poznan. Its purpose was to form the laity for Catholic Action, to
co-ordinate all activities throughout the country, and to found
Diocesan Institutes. In 1934, the definitive forms, which we have
described, were stabilised for the whole country.
In Czechoslovakia, faced
with acute racial and political problems, progress has been slower.
The chief developments have been in the youth organisations: the Orol
(Eagle), the S.K.M., and Omladina (Youth).
Orol is a devotional and
social organisation. Its chief spiritual work is the General
Communion on each first Friday. It conducts popular lectures,
study-clubs, and sporting and physical-culture associations. It is
very strong numerically, and organised in three divisions:
schoolchildren up to twelve years of age, adolescents up to sixteen,
and the ordinary members who commonly remain in the organisation
until about thirty.
S.K.M. (Sdruzeine
Katolickej mlasleze . . . the Association of Catholic Youth), which
was founded in 1911, appears to be evolving rapidly towards Catholic
Action. It emphasises intellectual formation, with its study-circles
and courses of lectures.
Omladina, like S.K.M.,
has an age limit of about twenty- five. It is concerned chiefly with
cultural formation, with libraries, publications, lectures,
study-circles and so on.
It seems that Catholic
Action is growing, especially, from S.K.M. and Omladina. The idea of
specialisation according to milieu already appears in S.K.M.
Amongst the Catholic
Croats of Jugoslavia, the youth movements make headway, too. The
Crusaders, founded in 1929, consist of masculine and feminine
sections, with a National Chaplain common to both. In the Sections or
Fraternities is developed spiritual, moral, social instruction : the
method is the method of EnquSte (the enquiry method developed by the
Jocists, which promises to be, in most places, the basis of education
for Catholic Action). The Crusaders carry on a vigorous
house-to-house propaganda and they are active in the distribution of
papers and literature. They organise national congresses and
pilgrimages, not only for their own members, but for the Catholic
population generally. There is complete specialisation for the
student sections, and specialisation for the workers and the agrarian
sections is now developing. The Crusaders are from sixteen to thirty
years of age, with junior sections for children. The organisation is
parochial, diocesan, and national, with headquarters at Zagreb.
Specialisation also
appears in Hungary, where the peasant organisations are developing a
Catholic Action appropriate to the peasant milieu.
In Switzerland,
specialisation also extends to the racial and lingual divisions.
Italian-speaking Switzerland is organised on the Italian model, the
French types of organisation appear in the French-speaking cantons,
while German-speaking Switzerland has long been influenced by the
characteristic developments of Catholic Social Action in Bavaria and
the Rhineland.
Roumania is of special
interest, for it is the first example (as yet) of Byzantine Catholic
Action. Both the Latin and the Oriental Rites exist, but the State
gives juridical recognition only to the Oriental Rite. There have
been determined campaigns since the War to establish the Orthodox
religion as the one State religion, and in 1929, Agru (Associatiunea
generala a romanilov uniti) was organised amongst the Catholic
Byzantines as a defence. In 1933, the Hierarchy established it as
Catholic Action, coordinating under it all societies and auxiliary
organisations, confraternities and the like. Specialised
organisations were created where they were needed, as, for instance,
Astru, for University students. There are now something over one
thousand parish sections of Catholic Action, though as yet it is a
somewhat loosely organised structure. Its particular interest, as we
have said, is that it is the first example of Byzantine Catholic
Action. In the East, there has not been a multiplicity of societies
and confraternities, and Catholic Action will probably develop in
simpler and more exact forms than in most parts of the West.
In Germany and in Austria
the Catholic organisations, especially those of Catholic Social
Action (as distinguished from Catholic Action proper) have a long and
remarkable history, which has been admirably recounted by Mr. Henry
Somerville in his book, The Catholic Social Movement. Their present
position is obscure; but whatever their future is to be, they remain
an example and in many respects a guide to Catholics everywhere.
In Spain's crisis there
has inevitably been some interruption of the normal development of
Catholic Action : but it advances, and in its advance one must see
not merely the best but perhaps the sole hope for a Christian
reconciliation. It was the young members of Catholic Action serving
at the front with the Nationalists who taught their fellows this
prayer, translated in a recent London Tablet by Alfonso de Zulueta:
O Lord, Who commandest us
to love our enemies, and Who desirest not the death of the sinner,
but that he should be converted and live, hear our prayer and grant
the grace of final repentance to those who die fighting against Thee
on the battlefields. May Divine Mercy shine on the side of human
juitice, so that our enemies may not be so unfortunate as to lose
Eternal Life together with their earthly existence.
We unite our petition
with that which Jesus Christ offered Thee from the Cross, when,
looking on His executioners, He asked forgiveness for them. We beg it
of Thee, O God of battles, Who livest and reignest for ever and ever.
Amen.
It may be assumed that
Catholic Action in the United States will be developed under the
general direction of the National Catholic Welfare Conference. The
N.C.W.C. was established in 1919, "for the promotion of unity in
Catholic Work." It has an Administrative Board of ten
Archbishops and Bishops, elected at the annual meeting of the
Hierarchy of the United States, and it consists, in its major
structure, of seven departments, each with a Chairman appointed from
its own members by the Administrative Board.
Under the Executive
Department function the Bureau of Immigration; the National Centre of
the Confraternity of Christian Doctrine; the Youth Bureau; the
Publications Service; the official organ of the N.C.W.C., Catholic
Action; and the Business and Finance Bureaux.
The Department of
Education exists to serve Catholic schools.
The Press Department
provides an extensive news, feature, and pictorial service to the
Catholic press.
The Social Action
Department was established to promote knowledge of Catholic social
teachings and to study their application to the particular problems
of the United States. Industrial relations, international affairs,
civic education, social welfare, the problems of the family are its
province. It has a Rural Life Bureau which is especially concerned
with the problems of America's vast rural population.
The Legal Department is
charged with the examination of legislation, proposed or enacted ; it
prepares literature dealing with the legal aspects of such matters as
the schools question, sterilisation, birth prevention; it coordinates
information from all quarters of the world on religious and social
questions of concern to Catholics, pj The Department of Catholic
Action Study gathers and co-ordinates information regarding Catholic
Action and promotes its study.
The Department of Lay
Organisations, which may ultimately become the National Executive of
Catholic Action, now consists of two bodies: the National Council of
Catholic Men and the National Council of Catholic Women.
The constituents of the
National Council of Catholic Men are affiliated societies of Catholic
men, national, diocesan, parish, or district; and Parish, Deanery,
and Diocesan Councils organised by the N.C.C.M. with the approval of
the Ordinary in several Dioceses.
The N.C.C.M. represents
the general body of American Catholic men; it federates their
societies, serves them with information, promotes unity amongst them,
helps their local organisations to effective work, co-operates with
other approved movements in the general service of the Church, and
acts generally throughout the nation to extend a wider knowledge and
understanding of Catholic principles.
It conducts the Catholic
Evidence Bureau and the nation-wide Catholic Radio Hour.
The National Council of
Catholic Women is a federation of Catholic women's organisations. It
establishes diocesan councils with the Ordinary's approval, and it
maintains national committees, representing the general interests of
Catholic women in the United States, much as the N.C.C.M. represents
the interests of Catholic men. It has a National Catholic School of
Social Service which has graduated students from all parts of the
world.
In this whole structure
of the National Catholic Welfare Conference, the United States
obviously possesses much of the machinery for national Catholic
Action.
In Australia, after a
great deal of preparatory formation, a National Secretariat of
Catholic Action has been set up. It is concerned, in its first
stages, with the training of leaders, the militants of Catholic
Action. It recognises the need for specialisation and for gradual
development as the layman is informed with the spirit and with the
intelligence of Catholic Action. It proposes these types of
organisation: school groups for children under fourteen years of age,
groups for boys and for girls between the ages of fourteen and
eighteen, groups for young men and for young women between the ages
of eighteen and thirty, groups for adult men and for adult women,
groups for students, and vocational groups. In these groups people
will be formed for Catholic Action. It is recognised that a period of
preliminary formation is essential before the whole task of Catholic
Action is attempted: and this seems a lesson worth the learning. The
forms of Catholic Action mean very little unless they are informed by
the spirit of Catholic Action: and we believe it essential that the
normal Catholic life should be tempered, spiritually and
intellectually, before it is fit for the apostolate.
It remains, of course, in
the discretion of the Ordinary to establish that machinery which he
believes necessary to the local situation. In England, the tendency
is to organise diocese by diocese, with the general outline of a
national structure in view. In Ireland, there has been little
specific organisation for Catholic Action, but the spirit which
informs it has found a variety of expressions t in the Legion of
Mary, for example, which has already spread into Africa, Australia,
and America. One turns from French Canada, with its amazing
development on the models of France and of Belgium, to the remote
African forests, where Blessed Charles Lwanga, martyred in Uganda in
1886, is venerated as the "special patron before God of African
Youth participating in Catholic Action"; one turns from Mexico,
where a persecuted people produces, heroically, a Catholic Action
which is indeed of the Catacombs in its devotion and, please God, in
its consequences, to the Philippines where five hundred native
leaders trained in ethics, in the social sciences, in the teachings
of the Encyclicals conduct a constant campaign for Christ. And
everywhere the leaven is working. Working to sanctify societies which
had forgotten their God.
It reveals itself not
only in the increase of social sanctity, but in the personal sanctity
of the members of Catholic Action: by the great increase, most
noticeable amongst the workers and peasants and students of France
and Belgium, in late vocations: by the apostolic life of a young man
like Pier Giorgio Frassati, acclaimed by all Milan,at his death a decade ago, a saint of God.
It reveals itself in the spirit of martyrdom, in a Maria da
Luz Gamacho, murdered by soldiery bent on
sacrilege, and already, within four years of her death, invoked by
Mexican Catholic Action as Virgin and Martyr.
It is not a matter for
wonder that a great Pope has thanked God for the privilege of life in
this hour.