Impressions of a Jocist Camp

Irish Jesuit Province

Impressions of a Jocist CampAuthor(s): James O'ConnellSource: The Irish Monthly, Vol. 78, No. 924 (Jun., 1950), pp. 257-261Published by: Irish Jesuit ProvinceStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20516188 .

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IMPRESSIONS OF A JOCIST CAMP

By JAMES O'CONNELL, S.M.A., M.A.

THE Jocist movement which has existed for over twenty years now in Belgium and France and which has played such an

important role in the Catholic revival in these countries is still

in the English-speaking countries comparatively unknown. One reads

or hears of the Continental groups, but few in the United States,

Britain or Ireland have had direct experience of Jocism. However,

that situation is changing rapidly and in Britain, for example, the

Jocists, or Young Christian Workers, are becoming a feature of

Catholic social life. The present article is an effort to describe the

impressions of two Irish seminarians who spent a week at the National

Study Week at Ampleford, Yorkshire, for Y.C.W. members from all

parts of England. I have preferred to use the method of relating our

own impressions rather than that of a more impersonal account. The

former method will give greater flexibility and perhaps prevent the

giving of false impressions resulting from any inadequacy in our dis

cernment.

At the very beginning of the Study Camp we were, and felt, quite uneasy. We had dressed in mufti and ostensibly were the same as

the other members there; no one among the general body knew we

were seminarians. We were accepted as belonging to themselves.

Yet we realized that we simply did not fit in, and the experience was not exactly a pleasant one. We had read of the priest-workmen in France and of the new methods of apostolate being used there by a

number of priests in the Mission de Paris and the Mission de France. These methods had seemed attractive to us for the spheres in which

they were being employed, and while they apparently involved a

number of material sacrifices, these were no greater than any zealous

apostle would cheerfully undergo. But the real difficulty of the task of these men came home to us forcibly from our term in the camp.

Wearing old clothes?and ours were pretty worn?sleeping on

palliasses in a gymnasium, the roughness of the food and other such difficulties were of small account. The words of Abb? Michonneau struck us forcibly: "We mean that our influence upon ordinary people is not what it should be, partly because we are different from

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them; we think differently, live differently, speak and act differently. In other words, we have a different culture. Our seminary training in the classics, philosophy, theology, has put us in a class apart. Pro

perly speaking, we ar<* not like any of our parishioners, but we seem

more * middle-class

' or

* bourgeois

' than anything else. . . . We

have learned . . . bookishly." The apparent coarseness of some of the boys, their loudness in

speech and tht roughness of their manners, their different attitude to

aspects of life, their good-natured fellowship in the local pub and some of the vulgar humour in the concert they held?all these things

made us almost dislike them. In the beginning it was sweet to get

away from the general crowd to our own company or to a chat with one or two fellows with whom we seemed to have more in common.

The whole atmosphere simply made us want to retreat out of it. But

gradually the truth of the situation and the real nature of what was

happening came home to us and we realised that it was not these

boys nor their camp which were wrong but we ourselves. We had

wanted them to be much as we were, or at least much as their Irish

counterparts would be. We had forgotten the whole background of

these lads from factories with noise and obscene talk, with monot

onous work and soul-stifling conditions, from homes which often were barely Christian, districts where the only ideas of leisure were

the cinema, the pub or the dance hall. They were from pagan

surroundings: yet here they were professing to be apostles of their

fellow-workers. It is amazing to anyone who knows the background of factory or other work in England to realize that young fellows

would spend their holidays at such a get-up as a study camp: it is more amazing still to find them inspired with a generous spirit of

apostolate and a realization of the condition of their country both in

its working and general living conditions. We had wanted these, boys to fit into a groove we had conceived as being a Christian ideal:

they, by what they said and did, shattered our preconceptions and

led us to learn of a new Christian nobility, a nobility of factories,

workshops and offices which was expressed in example rather than

in words and which involved one of the deepest of struggles, the

struggle against the entire conditioning of one's social environment. We never knew when we should run up against real gold. In a

public-house conversation one night a tall, tough-looking fellow with

whom we were discussing factory problems told of his own situa

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JOCIST CAMP

tion. He worked among girls : "

Girls," he said, "

are the worst of

all to work among. Their talk is worse than that of any man. When

they knew I was joined a crowd named the Y.C.W. they called me

a * holy Joe

' and mocked me for ages." But he became a hero when

he approached the manager for them and succeeded in getting unpaid overtime stopped. Quite unexpectedly we found out from another

fellow drinking a glass of bitter that he hoped to study for the priest hood. A Franciscan had offered to get him into the Franciscan

novitiate but the fellow had refused because he wanted to become a

secular priest, work for the working class and have the opportunity of being a Y.C.W. chaplain. Another at a different time remarked :

"This Y.C.W. makes you think of being a priest." But the vast

majority wanted to be apostles in their own factories and jobs, mis

sionaries of the interior who would work not amongst coloured

peoples in foreign lands but among the black-faced and grimy com

panions of their working places and districts.

There was a wonderful sense of fellowship in the camp. They were

all Y.C.W. s, all workers, and proud of the fact. It is a new thing in our world that men should be proud of being factory workers. Of

course, there were some who let one know they had better jobs than

some of their fellows and were of more consequence. But these were

few.

Perhaps the morning Mass was the best expression of their com

radeship amongst themselves and of their union with Christ, the

Leader of the working class. The Mass was a dialogue Mass and it

gave a real sense of participation in the sacrifice to hear the whole

congregation of boys say the responses together. Their joining in the

Gloria was the exulting joy of a Christian community: the Credo a

collective act of living faith. The Catholicism of the Church came

home feelingly to one when one heard the Proper of the Mass read

aloud in English by a shrill cockney voice, and the Ordinary read in

the stumbling accents of Tyneside. Different boys took over the

job each morning: they often stumbled and halted, jibbed at the

bigger words. But that community was no sleeping partner in the

Sacrifice of Christ and His Church. Each morning before Mass one

of the chaplains celebrating spoke for about five or ten minutes, and

it was well ordered that each morning the lecture was concerned

with some aspect of the living mystery of the Church. The intention

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IRISH MONTHLY

for each Mass was announced, lowly workaday intentions for the

boys, for living and dead members.

A lecture of about an hour's length was given each morning by some one of the national leaders. A discussion followed during which opinions wouid be expressed and facts reported. The boys discussed the lecture first in small groups of ten or so, then the entire crowd came together for the final discussion. The lecturers dealt with the mission of the Y.C.W. and with the practical means

for furthering this mission.

These members of this organization had their whole method codified in the

*' See, Judge, Act

" slogan of the movement. They

observed, they evaluated in the light of the ideal, they always tried to

do their bit to remedy or improve situations. One heard of safety

guards being secured for machines, walls being built to protect children, tea-breaks or good ventilation being secured at work: one

heard of lapsed Catholics returning to the Sacraments, workers

coming into the Church. Above all, one sensed that here were young men who knew what they were about in life. They, unlike ordinary reformers among workers, did not want merely more money for

themselves and their fellows: they wanted a richer life before any

thing else. Well do they say each morning in the Y.C.W. prayer: "Lord Jesus, I offer Thee this day all my work, my hopes, and

struggles, my joys and sorrows. . . . Thy Kingdom come in all our

factories, workshops, offices and in all our homes. . . ."

The over-all impression one received was that here were young fellows who knew where they were going and why. Modern cultural

scholars like Ortega y Gasset may deplore the deterioration in culture

which the latter says has come about through the diffusion of authority and general social benefits among the masses of the people: he speaks of

" the revolt of the masses M. There is a certain amount of truth

in the contention. But here were boys who proudly asserted they were of the masses and wanted to remain so. Yet they took no part of their world for granted but in a critical and constructive spirit they

sought to judge and to act.

These Young Christian Workers act in no vacuum either. They were deeply conscious of reality and of the necessity of working within the existing framework of things, not of the useless desire to

withdraw from their world. They grasped the necessity of intimacy with Christ and the subordination of all means to this end. But they

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JOCIST CAMP

insisted that to live a Christlike life the individual must have a proper

opportunity of leading a decent human life and so they strove to

improve the surroundings and general working conditions of them

selves and their companions. I could describe many other things which we saw but lack of space

forbids it. One may perhaps object and say that the situation as I

have described it is slightly rose-coloured. It is true that there are

defects in all human enterprises. But it is better not to unbalance

an account with an insistence on defects when the general situation

was such as to promise real hope for this "

second spring "

of which

continental Catholics are now speaking for the Church.

The Y.C.W. holds out the fullness of the Christian life as the ideal.

It insists on the brotherhood of the working class seen in its proper

setting of the Fatherhood of God; it seeks to remedy what Pius XI

called "

the great tragedy of the 19th century ", the loss of the work

ing classes to the Church. It adopts the apostolate of the workers

by the workers as commended by the same Pope in his Encyclical, Divini Redemptoris. One is sad to find that even still in countries

like England the title, "

worker ", evokes the idea of Communist.

Recently a lady slapped the face of a Y.C.W. member who was selling his paper, Young Worker, outside a church-door. She thought a

person selling such a paper must be a Communist!

The Y.C.W. is no mere "

bait "

for workers to enter the Church.

Rather it is a call to the integral living of life which is found in

Catholic Christianity alone. Jocists make their own of the words of

Cardinal Suhard in his great pastoral letter, Rise or Decline of the

Church: "Go forward, work at the building of the new world. It

depends on you whether it will be Christian or not. The world will

belong to those who conquer it first. Upon you, therefore, depends the task of securing the Second Spring of the Church."

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Impressions of a Jocist Camp

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