Homily during a mass at the International YCW World Council in Adelaide in 1991.
Transcript
In the early days of industrialisation one of the things that happened was that people needed coal and they needed steel. And so mining grew enormously.
And one of the things that happened in the mines that was sort of like a special call to people was that they saw workers put in dangerous places in the mines.
That the pit pony was put where he would not die, because if the worker died, then you could always get another worker. But if the pit pony died, you had to buy one.
And people began to see that there’s a difference, that the pit ponies were being preferred, given a special place above a human being.
Oh, they were hard times, industrialisation times.
They were times that challenged the way people lived and human beings workers went through a great change at that time.
Work was different and it caused great hardships for people, great challenges too.
And that’s when YCW was born. And one of the great gifts of the movement was that it stressed the dignity, the great irreplaceable dignity of every human person.
That a human person, as Cardijn so many times said, was worth more than all the gold in the world.
Every human person was worth that. And for us who have been part of the YCW over the years we knew that truth of faith.
We heard it talked about at our training weekends. We discussed it in our meetings. We reflected on it and we knew the impetus and the motivation it gave us in life to know the value of “me” as a person.
To know further, the second part, that not only have we a value but that we have a mission, that every person has a mission in the world and was made for that.
Vocation is a word that people use, mostly about priests and nuns. In the YCW, vocation, mission, calling, that was for every worker. We were unique, each one of us, and we had something to do and our lives could make a difference. And we went out and we took action and we discovered that our lives did make a difference.
And for all of you people here tonight, I think, those of you who knew the YCW and were deeply involved in it, others who have been friends of the movement, your lives did and still do make a difference and your calling, your special calling is to your ordinary everyday life. A call there to your work life, wherever that work is.
That’s what we celebrate today. It is the gift of the YCW to the Church and to the world, the gift of understanding of that. And so many things followed as a result.
I think that each one of us in our own era, we thought the YCW was the best and we still do think it was best in our day. Interesting to read so many articles where people keep saying if the YCW could get back to its heyday. When was its heyday? When I was in it!
But the YCW today is different. The YCW today is something to be colossally proud of in Australia. The people who are members of the YCW today, in some ways perhaps they lead the YCW of the last fifty years and in some ways perhaps they don’t.
But they face today’s world and they face it and take on action and life in difficult times, in a world that’s not so easy. And I think we should be proud of them. We should be proud of the work that they did in taking on and running the (International YCW) World Council in Australia.
We should be proud of the things we read in the newspapers and hear on our radios of the YCW’s work here in Australia and South Australia now with unemployed people, with casual workers, their work with people who are struggling.
Many young people today there are in Australia, in South Australia, who have never had a job and have reached twenty one or twenty two. They’ve left school for years and have never had a job. For most of those people, they cannot live.
Without work you die, not just for no food. You die inside because you can’t contribute. Many of those people having are getting psychiatric help now and the world says are where you see they are a bit sick.
They’re not a bit sick. it’s society that sick. And it’s growing sicker in that area.
And the YCW today faces a lack of dignity for workers that’s far greater than it was 10 years ago.
It’s good to hear Bill talk about the things of the people who will come here. I’ve been very privileged in the last year to see some of those things.
I’d like to just tell you a quickly something of that.
I would like to tell you of the 60,000 Filipino maids living in Hong Kong, many of them women married with two children under school age, who leave their children with their husband and go to Hong Kong to work for three, four, five years. They don’t see their children for two years.
It is now the third highest export earner for the Philippines: maids. Of course, they are a little better off than the ones that are sold into the sex industry, which is not one or two but which is thousands.
It’s not 24 year olders or something as though it were better if it was, but many of them ten, eleven, twelve years old.
In places like Indonesia industrialisation is coming. They’ve never had it.
And so in the middle of the forest you find clearings with great big fences around where foreign entrepreneurs bring in their factories.
I have been there at five in the morning to see come out of the forest a thousand young girls with lipstick on to work.
Many of those people work for eleven, twelve hours a day for less than the price of a kilogram of rice in Indonesia.
Many of them work in the most menial jobs, terrible situations. Garment factories where girls’ bras and panties are inspected at the gate morning and night to see they haven’t changed them.
Lack of dignity. Places where YCW is building a struggle for justice, where young people are beginning to say I can take things on, I can make a difference.
There will be people here at this council who lived in a tree.
There will be many of them who left, who started work, like one of the girls I work with, who started work that on the day she was thirteen in a garment factory.
There will be people from the Philippines where I was just recently who are experiencing now this lahar flow from the Mount Pinatubo volcano. On the slopes of that mountain there’s two cubic kilometers of sand just on the slopes. Sixty miles away that sand is still three or four feet deep.
I was in Angeles two or three days ago where twenty five foot high – that would be as high as this church – of living mud flowed down, completely filled the river, overflowed it and completely obliterated two towns that probably five or six thousand people were living in.
People have hard times. People face differences. We do too.
In November and December we have a great opportunity to meet, to listen to. You have the chance to have them in your homed, young workers from other countries, brothers and sisters, YCWs.
Tonight we celebrate the dignity of work, the gift that God gave us in giving us work.
Tonight we celebrate the YCW that taught us that. We celebrate the gift of the lives of you people, who are and were the YCW, and can still build a Church that’s living, not just in a building but in streets, in towns, in homes and especially in workplaces.
Fr Hugh O’Sullivan, Homily at Mass for former YCW leaders, Adelaide, Australia, November 1991. Transcript slightly corrected.