The Australian Cardijn Institute will host a webinar to mark 100 years since Cardinal Joseph Cardijn’s landmark first meeting with Pope Pius XI, when the pontiff gave his enthusiastic approval to the emerging movement of the Young Christian Workers (YCW).
ACI Secretary and researcher Stefan Gigacz will share the intriguing backstory to the meeting on Tuesday, March 11, at 7pm AEDT.
Cardinal Cardijn often spoke of the first encounter with Pope Pius XI as an almost accidental meeting, in which a series of Vatican officials led him “into successive rooms, each one smaller than the last” until “they opened the last door (the only one which was closed)” and he found himself in the library of the Pope.
But the way that first encounter came to take place was, in fact, controversial and well-prepared. The YCW under threat
Cardinal Cardijn’s superior, Cardinal Désiré-Joseph Mercier, had already all but officially ruled that the YCW, which was already spreading quickly throughout Belgium, was to be closed down as a divisive, class-based movement that threatened the unity of the visible Body of Christ in Belgium.
Yet, against all apparent odds, Cardinal Cardijn succeeded in gaining an audience with Pius XI, who immediately endorsed the work of the YCW, exclaiming that “at last someone has come to me speaking about the masses.”
It was a meeting that proved so decisive that the famous French theologian, Yves Congar, later described it as “a prophetic encounter of the periphery and the centre,” placing it on the same level as the 13th-century meetings between Pope Innocent III with St Francis of Assisi and St Dominic that led to the founding of the Franciscans and Dominicans.
It is a remarkable story that is much more complex than often appreciated – and also surprisingly relevant to the development of a synodal Church today.
Registrations: https://australiancardijninstitute.org
FULL STORY
Cardijn, Pius XI and the YCW (Australian Cardijn Institute)
