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CATHOLIC YOUTH SERVICES - WHAT ARE THEY?

On the first Sunday of Advent in 1984 some two thousand people gathered in Westminster Cathedral to mark 1985 International Youth Year by celebrating the reorganisation of Our Catholic Youth Services. That so many from every part of the country and all manner of Catholic Youth groups should wish to celebrate the occasion suggests that the reorganisation was more than an exercise in restructuring. And indeed it was at the dawn of the liturgical year they gathered to celebrate a renewal well-founded in reflection and hard experience.

The Perspective of History

Almost a quarter of a century ago the Catholic Youth Service Council came into existence. The government had just published a major review of the Youth Service. This had emphasised the value of diverse philosophies within the service and encouraged the development of voluntary and denominational organisation working in partnership with central and local government. This was auspicious territory for a Church conscious of the need to develop its work among the young and taking those first uncertain steps into the Second Vatican Council. The skills and talents of colleagues and agencies with long experience of working with young people were to be harnessed to the work of the gospel and insights of Lumen Gentium and Gaudium et Spes.

Twenty-five years ago the youth work of the Church in England and Wales was on already sound foundations. Thirty youth organisations were loosely federated to the National Catholic Youth Association. Some owed their inspiration to the traditions of the great religious orders, secular institutes and international Catholic Societies. There were many student bodies. Parish youth clubs catered for the social and devotional life of Catholic youngsters. There were the energetic missionary groups whose members were trained in the exacting and invigorating school of Cardijn.

But it is not unfair to say that Catholic youth work had little contact with the national system, the local authorities, the voluntary organisations and the other Christian Church. It had drawn little on the shared experience and beginnings of professional development which had marked the early post war years.

Growth and Involvement

This was the world in which the Catholic Youth Service Council was born in 1961. The founding Fathers were priests from all the Dioceses of England and Wales acting on an initiative taken by Cardinal Godfrey. Their immediate concern was that parish youth clubs should take full advantage of the increasing resources and facilities available within the Youth Service. The early emphases were on the recruitment and induction of voluntary club leaders, the improvement of premises and the establishment of residential centres, where both leaders and young people could gather for more intensive training.

It was soon apparent that there was too narrow a span of preoccupations to measure up to the developmental and pastoral needs of young people. National Service was over, the school-leaving age rising. The proportion of young people was increasing. The girls were going to marry earlier, have more economic independence and spend more of their married life at work. There was a continuing failure of understanding between generations divided by very different memories of what it was like to be young. The ecclesiastical ground was shifting. Unfamiliar theology derived from the Second Vatican Council was percolating through to the parishes. Changes in catechetical method and sacramental discipline were added to the adoption of a vernacular liturgy and falling off in the practice of popular devotions. There was an unaccustomed waywardness and occasional loss of nerve.

The skills of the youth worker were becoming more pertinent to the life of the Church. The earlier emphasis on clubs and institutions were declining and the techniques of social group work, counselling and community development were coming, often unobserved, into everyday use.

Youth Work as a Local Enterprise

Across the sixties and the seventies the Council stretched limited resources to enable the Church to stay abreast of these changes and turn them to good pastoral account. A cardinal principle of its working method is that it provides a professional service to local church youth work: it is neither youth movement nor campaigning organisation. For the first fifteen years its officers enabled the dioceses to create their own patterns of provision matching resources to local needs and circumstances. Diocesan youth chaplains and officers were appointed and there was a growing realisation that those responsible should have a thorough grasp of the professional principles of youth and community work. In co-operation with the dioceses, the council also mounted extensive training programmes for priests, religious, seminarians, and course tutors, helping the dioceses to maintain and further develop their own independent styles of work. Few can now be aware of the parish, deanery and diocesan youth groups, discussions, pilgrimages and prayer meetings, of the schemes for the unemployed, disabled and community service, of the youth gathers, retreats and residential training sessions. Many dioceses now have a strong youth service presence, their own professional and advisory services and a confidence born of evident achievement.

The National Perspective

Behind this local work there lay a network of information, advisory and liaison service created and maintained through the national office of the Catholic Youth Council. There are the departments and agencies of the Bishops’ Conference, the youth unit of the British Council of Churches and the denominational youth departments. The Department of Education and Science still has the principal government responsibility for the Youth Service but the Home Office maintains responsibility for the voluntary sector at large.. The Department of Health and Social Security has programmes involving welfare and disablement, the Department of the Environment for sport, recreation and urban renewal. The Manpower Services Commission promotes vocational training and employment schemes. Close involvement in the work of the National Council for Voluntary Youth Services and the national Youth Bureau ensures that the Church has ready access to the experience and programmes of many youth organisations and the professional training agencies. Catholic young men and women represent us on the British Youth Council. On the international front Council members have been active in the International federation of Catholic Parochial Youth groups and maintain contact with the European Youth Foundation in Strasbourg and the Council of European National Youth Committees.

The Impulse for Change

So much for the ways in which the Catholic Youth Service Council responded to the needs. Small wonder that the structures of the sixties were ready for an overhaul in the eighties. The Council was a representative body ill-geared to the management of day-to-day programmes and insufficiently open to the devolution of responsibility. But it had pioneered over two difficult decades and had the vision to set in motion a review which it foresaw would lead to its demise.

The search was for a system which would:

• Ensure that the youth work of the Church is an integral part of its total mission. Whilst taking into account the special charisms and needs of the young, our youth work should never become a disparate enterprise.
• Engage young men and women as fully as possible in determining policies and carrying through programmes.
• Cultivate the excellent working relationships which exist between diocesan youth service and the Catholic associations so that there is a free flow of help and support.
• Improve professional advisory training and developmental services at both national and diocesan levels.
• Maintain an active presence of the Church in all aspects of youth work in England and Wales.

The Review Group had advice from educationalists, youth service practitioners and management consultants. Account was taken of the ‘Easter People’, the report on the Educative Task of the Catholic Community and 1982 government review of the Youth Service ‘Experience and Participation’. By happy chance the formulation of the new system coincided with the consultations which proceeded the reorganisations of the Bishops’ Conference.

Catholic Youth Services

Today the national body is called, quite simply, Catholic Youth services. It is an agency of the Bishops’ Conference of England and Wales working with the Department of Christian Doctrine and Formation. It retains its status as an independently registered educational charity.

All this development would be without point unless there is a clear understanding of the purposes for which Catholic Youth Services exists. In the Low Week Meeting of 1983 the Bishops’ Conference approved the following statement of aims and objectives:

• to bring young Catholics to a sense of active participation in the worshiping and serving Church
• to extend to all young people a care derived from the ideals and standards of the Gospel by providing Christian settings in which they can grow and by contributing to national programmes for the young people of England and Wales
• to train and support both young people and adults so that they can better carry out the mission of the Church and especially among the young

It is by these yardsticks that the performance of Catholic Youth Services should, and will be measured.

C A James
General Secretary
1985