The Catholic Times

Adequate Housing Needed, YCW Says
Workers Ask End To Hunger, Tests

ROME - (NC) - The World Council of the Young Christian Workers has summoned all young workers of the world to unite in a four-year program aimed at providing adequate food, housing and education for all mankind.

The council, which is composed of 400 young Catholic working men and women from 87 countries, issued a manifesto in which it appealed also to all young workers to "join in a crusade of public opinion demanding, insistently, a stop to atomic experiments and provisions for an effective disarmament."

The meeting of the YCW World council was the first in the history of Young Christian Worker movement, founded in Belgium 40 years ago. Coming immediately after the YCW pilgrimage which drew some 30,000 young workers to Rome, the World Council session approved an international statute to govern YCW affairs, set up a bureau to coordinate the work of YCW groups throughout the world and elected officers to head the movement for the next four years.

New President of the YCW- and as such, also president of the new international bureau- is Romeo Maioni, 32, a Canadian mechanic. A founder of the YCW in Canada and a veteran of 14 years in the movement, he succeeds Patrick Keegan of Great Britain.

Keegan gave a summary of the 40-year development of the YCW on the opening day of the congress, when Msgr. Joseph Cardijn founder and chaplain general of the organization, also made an address.

The 57-page manifesto drawn up and approved during the World Council meeting was established as a four-year program of the International YCW. Divided into three parts, it deals with general problems facing the world today, examines the possibilities of finding solutions for these problems, and proclaims the unity of the Young Christian Worker movement.

In its call to all young workers to join in a campaign for world disarmament and an end to nuclear weapons tests, the manifesto also calls for world non-aggression pacts. It urges individual workers: "Free yourself from petty prejudices, from narrow nationalism . . . Rid yourself of your selfishness and indifference!"

Among the "present urgent problems" working youth are called on to study and remedy are:

-Hunger, which afflicts two-thirds of mankind while the remaining third has food in over-abundance.

-Lack of decent housing.

-Education, which must provide training for young workers in their present and future missions, in their personal and family relations, professional and social, and civic, national and international life.

-The need to recognize the brotherhood which exists between people of all races and civilizations, excluding every form of discrimination.

-The fundamental necessity for each human person to know the reason for his or her existence, the purpose and end of life.

In its conclusion, the manifesto declares:

"The unshakeable conviction which the YCW possesses of the dignity-and mission of each young worker inspires all its programs and activities.

"This same conviction obliges

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YCW Ask
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the YCW to demand for each young worker the inviolable respect for his body and his soul, his conscience and his vocation --not a passive respect, but a respect which leads to love' and mutual aid, especially for the weakest...

"The YCW finds the source of this love for working youth not in mere human conviction alone, but also in its faith, inspired by revelation and Christian doctrine.

"The YCW believes in Christ God become man, who died freely on the Cross and who founded the Church to save all men and associated them in the work of His Redemption until the end of time."

In the election, which came on the fourth day of the World Council meeting, Maria Meersman of Belgium, a YCW member for 16 years, was reelected vice president of the International YCW and vice president of the new international bureau. Fourteen other members were elected to the bureau to represent all areas of the world.