PERTH, WA: November 7 — 13, 1985
Number 2452
LOCATION 26 John St, Perth, (off Fitzgerald St) POST ADDRESS PO Box 50, Perth Aberdeen St, WA, 6000
TELEPHONE: (09) 328 1388
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Workplace challenge for youth The challenge of the Australian Young Christian Worker, is that coming from a well adjusted stable and middle class background, they have much to give to the apostolate of the work place, according to national YCW chaplain Father Hugh O'Sullivan. He says there are now serious pockets of unrest among Australian youth, where drug taking and thieving are a way of life in streets, where people congregate in the cheapest housing. He quoted a local CYSS worker, not a Catholic, who said he can recognise at a glance if the youth coming in the d(x)r is from a single parent family. At the YCW meeting the youth has to take responsibility for other people in the workplace, for the youths who are depressed and last because they sit by the phone waiting for casual jobs from the big stores, who can earn only a small amount of cash before their social security cuts out.
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Youth leaders
Three of the YCW workers at the key-leaders school at Mandurah recently are (from left) Paul Christoffenson, from Townsville, Jeanette Noonan, of Collie, and Correna Risborg, of Whyalla.
PART FOR A THE IrCtil Today's adults who grew up in the YCW a generation ago may have a part to play in the present movement by being chaplains to groups at a time when priests are getting scarce. Special
This is the view of the national YCW chaplain Father Hugh O'Sullivan who has been making his second visit to the WA YCW groups. "What makes me welcome wherever I go is that priests say their parish councillors and other leaders they meet were formed by the YCW many years ago "The YCW became the most successful expression of Pope Pius XI's hope for Catholic Action, of being involved in lay life, not using
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the world as an occasion for virtue but seeing that we are sharing God's creative work when we are working. "Love is the vocation God gives us and we fulfill that vocation when we love, in friendships, in falling in low, in marriage, in believing in hope in a changing world. Father O'Sullivan believes the YCW has outgrown its crisis of the 1970s when it virtually ceased to exist except in Melbourne and Perth.
Today it is in 15 dioceses and although its numbers do not rise dramatically he sees a stronger movement.
In the two years since he visited Perth the local groups have developed a strength of leadership. He admits it is different from the golden years of the Australian YCW in the 1940s and 1950s when it was in some places a highly sporting and social organisation that kept people around the church. "Even if it were culturally possible to do that today it
would not be the direction in which we would set out."
work is central to the whole social question.
He sees the YCW as distinctly different from many other new youth activities in the Church that emphasise conversion and spiritual experience for a young per-
"Cardijn also saw young people starting work were changing cultures, leaving the security of home for a culture that would affect them, that they needed all the support they could get when their Catholic education and development was going to leave them.
son. The YCW is about young people only because it takes a person at the vital moment when works becomes a factor in life. "Cardijn saw that work was central to human life. Pope John Paul has said
"Cardijn felt if young people could be helped at that stage they could he made aspostles in the life of the world and lay leaders in that world," he said.
"They are needing lots of support, they are hurt by it, they over-eat, there are family arguments over them, they leave home because of it. "There is no standardisation of action in the YCW and there never was. "It takes people exactly where they are and gets them to make one step forward through motivation and through Christian gospel values.
National YCW zhaplain, Father Hugh O'Sullivan "There is no end point for the YCW. "Everyone has to take just that one step forward today." Father O'Sullivan sums up today's YCW in the words Pope John Paul spoke at the tomb of Joseph Cardijn in Brussels earlier this year. "He said the vocation of the lay person is solidarity, participation and justice. "We've takea those words up, and are trying to channel our work in that direction," Father O'Sullivan said.
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