YCS Panel Discussion

Catholic Youth Formation and Action — Young Christian Students (YCS) Movement

Some Reflections from

Msgr. Robert J. Vitillo, of Catholic Charities USA

And former Advisor on the HIV/AIDS Pandemic to

the International Secretariat of IYCS

28 June 2026

RESPONSE 1: “How has our past YCS experience helped us to grow as persons of faith and action?”

There is a phrase that often was echoed in the YCS movement: “Every YCS member is a missionary.” Not the classic missionary who leaves her or his home country, culture, and moves to an area of the world that may not have heard anything about Jesus’ Gospel or the Catholic Church. YCS missionaries were encouraged to preach and live the gospel, now, today, in the classroom, in the hallway, in the neighborhood. Perhaps this is the main reason that YCS has the power to form young people not just as churchgoers, but as disciples who act especially in today’s secularized world.

YCS was founded by Cardinal Joseph Cardijn with a singular vision: to bring students to Christ, and Christ to students. What set Cardijn’s method apart was his refusal to treat young people as passive recipients of formation. He believed that the best apostle to a student is another student. And so he built a movement structured around what we came to know as the Review of Life — the See-Judge-Act methodology. You look honestly at your world. You bring it into judgment with the light of the Gospel. And then you act as part of a holistic way of life.

Pope St. John Paul II captured this vision when he wrote in Christifideles Laici that “youth must not simply be considered as an object of pastoral concern for the Church: in fact, young people are and ought to be encouraged to be active on behalf of the Church as leading characters in evangelization and participants in the renewal of society” (Christifideles Laici, §46). In the same document, St. John Paul II called adolescence and young adulthood “particularly significant and decisive moments for discerning God’s call and embracing the mission entrusted by Him” (Christifideles Laici, §58). YCS takes that claim seriously. This is the reason the YCS movement asks young people not to wait until they are older, more educated, or more spiritually polished before they engage. It asks them to act now — and to discover their faith in the acting.

In Christus Vivit (2019), Pope Francis strongly echoed this conviction strongly. He affirms that young people are not just the future of the Church — they are the present. They are not receptacles for evangelization; they are its protagonists. The peer-to-peer model that YCS embodies — the Review of Life conducted by students, for students, facilitated but not dominated by adults — is precisely the kind of structure Francis envisioned when he called the Church to trust youth with genuine responsibility.

And at the heart of this formation is love. Pope Benedict XVI wrote in Deus Caritas Est that “love is the light — and in the end, the only light — that can always illuminate a world grown dim and give us the courage needed to keep living and working” (Deus Caritas Est, 2005). That is what See-Judge-Act produces in students who engage with it faithfully: not an ideological program, not a checklist of good works, but a growing capacity to see the world with the eyes of love, and to respond. Benedict’s words to young people at World Youth Day 2007 ring just as true today: “Do not be afraid of Christ! He takes nothing away, and he gives you everything.”

The data supports what experienced youth ministers have always known. A 2023–24 international survey by the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross Footprints Research Group — conducted across 4,889 young people in eight countries — found that 50% of young people reported an increased interest in spirituality over the past five years, while only 15% reported a decline. Young people are not indifferent to faith. They are hungry for a faith that connects to real life. The Diocese of San José’s 2024 Young Adult Survey, with nearly 1,000 responses, found that 85% of respondents had participated in community service projects, with younger respondents aged 18 to 23 reporting the highest levels of involvement. The desire for meaningful action is already there.

In his address to Italian Catholic Action Youth on December 19, 2025, Pope Leo XIV called on young people to holiness with an urgency that felt personally directed: “To become saints, like Pier Giorgio Frassati — who was part of Catholic Action — and like Carlo Acutis: I encourage you to imitate their passion for the Gospel and their works, always animated by charity.” He went further, offering a definition of Catholic action that strikes to the core of what YCS has always sought to be: “To make peace is the quintessential ‘Catholic action’, because it is the gesture that makes us witnesses of Jesus, the Redeemer of the world.”

This is the formation that YCS offers. Not merely skills. Not merely information. But a life shaped by encounter with Christ — an encounter that overflows into encounter with neighbor, and neighbor, and neighbor after that. When we ask how our past YCS experience has helped us grow as persons of faith and action, the honest answer is: it gave us a method that is also a spirituality. It taught us to look, to judge, to act — and to do it together, as a community of friends who also are missionaries.

RESPONSE 2: “What opportunities does the Church offer for youth and young adult formation for Catholic action?”

If you walked into most parishes and asked to see the pathways they offer for forming young people for genuine Catholic action — not just participation, but formation for mission in the world — you might find a lot of energy and a fair amount of confusion. There are programs, there are events, there are conferences. But do they form young people to be protagonists? Do they help them move from service to solidarity, from charity to justice? The Church offers extraordinary opportunities. The question is whether we are deploying them with the clarity and intentionality they deserve.

Let us start with a crucial distinction — one that Pope Benedict XVI makes with characteristic precision in Deus Caritas Est. He cited both the Church’s duty of charity and the pursuit of justice: “The Church cannot and must not take upon herself the political battle to bring about the most just society possible. She cannot and must not replace the State. Yet at the same time she cannot and must not remain on the sidelines in the fight for justice” (Deus Caritas Est, §28–29). Both dimensions are necessary. A Church that only feeds the hungry but never asks why people are hungry has not yet fully obeyed the Gospel. And a Church that only advocates for structural change but never kneels beside the suffering person has forgotten something essential about love.

I once was asked to address a distinguished group of professors and their families who frequented the Catholic Chapel at Yale University – they asked me to speak on the topic “Is Charity Just?” I said that I only would speak on this topic only if I could ask the second question
Is Justice charitable?” While I served at the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops as the Executive Director of the Catholic Campaign for Human Development, we often called charity and justice as the “two feet if social development”.

St. John Paul II had already drawn this same double line in Christifideles Laici: “Charity towards one’s neighbor... represent the most immediate, ordinary and habitual ways that lead to the Christian animation of the temporal order, the specific duty of the lay faithful” (§41). But he was equally clear that “the lay faithful are never to relinquish their participation in ‘public life’... the defense and the promotion of justice” (§42). Formation for Catholic action must hold both. Soup kitchens and policy advocacy. Tutoring children and challenging the systems that under-resource their schools. Service and solidarity.

In Christus Vivit, Pope Francis pushed this even further. He called young people to be protagonists — not passive participants — in the life of the Church and of society. He explicitly encouraged youth engagement in political life and solidarity with the poor, insisting that young people who are formed in authentic faith will not remain indifferent to the suffering of the world around them. In his message for the 40th Anniversary of World Youth Day on October 7, 2025, Pope Leo XIV strongly echoed this call: “work together, from volunteerism to ‘political charity,’ to build new living conditions for all.” He warned young people: “Do not follow those who use the words of faith to divide; instead, make plans to remove inequalities and reconcile divided and oppressed communities.” And at the Jubilee of Youth on August 2, 2025, he was even direct: “Seek justice in order to build a more humane world. Serve the poor, and so bear witness to the good that we would always like to receive from our neighbours.”

The Church’s landscape of formation opportunities for youth spans both dimensions. The Young Christian Students and Young Christian Workers movements, connected globally through the International YCS and the International Young Christian Workers, offer the most methodologically rigorous peer-led formation available to Catholic youth today — the See-Judge-Act Review of Life remains unmatched as a tool for connecting faith to the realities of daily life. Catholic Relief Services and Caritas youth programs provide pathways for both direct service and global solidarity advocacy. The USCCB’s Sons and Daughters of Light pastoral plan offers a national framework. The National Catholic Youth Conference, Steubenville Conferences, and Campus Ministry programs reach young people at key formation moments. The Laudato Si’ Action Platform, for which I serve as focal point on behalf of the Vatican’s Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development, engages youth around integral ecology. And the upcoming World Youth Day 2027 in Seoul, following the Jubilee of Youth 2025, provides anchor moments of universal encounter.

Speaking to the National Meeting of Catholic Religion Teachers on April 25, 2026, Pope Leo offered a reminder that grounds all of these efforts: “The religious dimension ‘is a constitutive element of the human experience and cannot be marginalized in the educational process of the younger generations.’” Formation is not an add-on to education. It is its deepest purpose.

And yet the data calls us to honest reckoning. The Life Teen 2024 State of Catholic Youth Report found that only 24% of American youth identify as Catholic. That is not a crisis to be managed — it is a mission to be embraced. But there is genuine reason for hope: Barna Group 2025 data shows that Gen Z now attends church an average of 1.9 times per month, the highest of any generation currently, suggesting a genuine hunger for community and encounter. And Springtide Research Institute’s 2025 findings show that Catholicism is the most popular denomination among young Christians aged 13 to 25 in the United States, with 28% identifying as Catholic. The opportunities are real. The hunger is real. What remains is the question of whether our formation structures are ready to meet it.

RESPONSE 3: “What recommendations do we have to develop these opportunities for Catholic action among youth and young adults?”

With your permission, I will propose some concrete recommendations, rooted in the evidence and in the Church’s own Teaching, for developing genuine formation for Catholic action among young people.

Before we name them, let us hold one phrase steady as our foundation. Pope John Paul II wrote in Christifideles Laici: “The Church has so much to talk about with youth, and youth have so much to share with the Church. This mutual dialogue... will be a source of richness and youthfulness for the Church and civil society” (§46). Formation is not the Church dispensing wisdom to empty vessels. It is a conversation — mutual, generative, Spirit-led.

First: we could revitalize the Young Christian Students movement and similar peer-led movements built around the See-Judge-Act methodology. The Review of Life works because it roots formation in the real lives of real young people, rather than imported content from outside their experience. It forms the habit of reflection. It builds the capacity for discernment. It makes missionaries, not merely attendees. Where YCS chapters exist, they should be nourished. Where they do not, they could be planted.

Second: we must invest in adult mentors and chaplains. Cardijn’s own insight was paradoxical but profoundly wise: “the chaplain is everything and nothing.” Everything, because without an adult who is genuinely present, spiritually grounded, and willing to step back, peer-led movements collapse. Nothing, because the moment the chaplain takes over, the movement ceases to be peer-led. We need adults who know how to be present without being dominant — a formation challenge for ministers and educators in its own right.

Third: we should consider building explicit pathways from charitable service to justice analysis. When a young person spends a Saturday at a food bank, that is beautiful, and it must not stop there. The next question is: why are people hungry? The one after that: what can I do about the systems that produce hunger? Pope Benedict XVI wrote that formation requires “hearts which see” — people formed not merely in technique but in the capacity to be moved by love (Deus Caritas Est, §31). A heart that sees does not stop at the immediate need. It traces the chain of cause and asks harder questions.

Fourth: we need to integrate digital platforms that intentionally aim to engage in formation — not merely for entertainment or promotion. The Diocese of San José’s 2024 Young Adult Survey found that 51% of active young adults use religious apps or websites, making digital formation not a luxury but a necessity. This does not mean replacing community. It means extending it — providing resources for reflection, connecting young people across geographies, and meeting them where they already spend significant time.

Fifth: programs must be developed with genuine sensitivity to enculturation, particularly for Hispanic and Latino youth, who constitute approximately 33% of Catholic youth in the United States. One-size-fits-all formation is a failure of pastoral imagination. The richness of Latino Catholic culture, its communal spirituality, its devotional traditions, and its lived sense of the faith, are not deficits to be corrected. They are gifts to be built upon. Of course, on this joyous occasion, we have representatives of a plethora of cultures and diverse religious and liturgical expressions even within the one Catholic Church. Our young people need to learn how to preserve those cultural and religious traditions but also to share the gospel and action in charity and justice with a wider group of people in today’s world.

Sixth: we could connect youth to global solidarity networks — the International Young Christian Students, Caritas Internationalis, Catholic Relief Services — so that formation opens outward to the world, not inward to a single parish or diocese. At the Jubilee of Youth in August 2025, Pope Leo offered a vision of exactly this kind of expansive missionary identity: “How much the world needs missionaries of the Gospel who are witnesses of justice and peace! How much the future needs men and women who are witnesses of hope.” That is our goal. That is who we are forming.

And seventh, we must center the Eucharist and prayer as the non-negotiable source of Catholic action these are constitutive elements in our Catholic faith — not optional extras, not add-ons to the program, but the spring from which everything else flows. The Footprints Research Group survey found that Catholics who are knowledgeable about and committed to their faith show distinct patterns of regular religious practice. Formation and practice are not separate tracks. They are the same journey.

Pope Francis, in Christus Vivit, asked the Church to listen to youth “with the same seriousness and interest that young people can show when they speak to one another” (§174). Pope Leo XIV told young people at the Jubilee of Youth: “Aspire to great things, to holiness, wherever you are. Do not settle for less. Then you will see the light of the Gospel grow every day, within you and around you.” And Leo also reminded us that “Jesus chose to call his disciples ‘friends’... Christian witness is the fruit of a relationship of faith and love with Jesus” — from his WYD 40th Anniversary message of October 7, 2025.

These seven recommendations are not a master plan. They are an invitation — to dioceses, to parishes, to movements, such as YCS to each of us YCS alumni in this room — to take seriously our shared responsibility for the formation of a generation, including youth and young adults, that the Church needs, and that the world desperately needs, to be missionary disciples.

Citations:

• Pope John Paul II, Christifideles Laici (1988), §§41, 42, 46, 58, 63

• Pope Benedict XVI, Deus Caritas Est (2005), §§28–29, 31; World Youth Day 2007 Message

• Pope Francis, Christus Vivit (2019), §174

• Pope Leo XIV, Address to Italian Catholic Action Youth (19 December 2025)

• Pope Leo XIV, Message for World Youth Day 40th Anniversary (7 October 2025)

• Pope Leo XIV, Jubilee of Youth Address (August 2–3, 2025)

• Pope Leo XIV, Address to National Meeting of Catholic Religion Teachers (25 April 2026)

• Pontifical University of the Holy Cross Footprints Research Group International Survey (2023–24), 4,889 youth in 8 countries

• Diocese of San José 2024 Young Adult Survey (nearly 1,000 responses)

• Life Teen 2024 State of Catholic Youth Report

• Barna Group 2025 Gen Z Church Attendance Data

• Springtide Research Institute 2025 Youth Religious Identity Data

• Pew Research Center 2023–24 Religious Landscape Study

• PRRI 2025 Youth Church Attendance Data

In the spirit of Cardijn and the YCS movements, the IYCS 80th anniversary events also included a reflection session prior to the formal celebrations.

The reflection session was accompanied by panelists Msgr. Robert Vittilo, Chief Innovation and Program Officer at Catholic Charities USA and former IYCS Advisory Board member, and Rudy Dehaney, Director of Campus Ministry at Notre Dame of Maryland University, also a Cardijn Associates Board member.

The session opened with attendees sharing personal stories of how YCS has made a difference in their lives as persons of faith and action. It then asked what opportunities the church offers for youth and young adult formation for Catholic action.

Msgr. Vittilo highlighted multiple pathways that the church offers for youth and young adult formation including opportunities such as the Caritas youth programs, the National Catholic Youth Conference, and campus ministry programs. He noted that a recent youth report data showed that young people are seeking community and encounter as a sign of hope.

Dehaney pointed to the experience of a hierarchical church that often impedes lay initiatives especially at the parish level. Some attendees noted that their experience of church in the US is very different than that in the countries they came from. They had the sense that money drove parish concerns rather than the growth of the people. Now as parents, former YCS members also noted that it is very challenging to engage their children in church activities at the parish level and often did not feel supported if they voiced their concerns.

The session also raised an important observation. As YCS members, many alumni felt the bond with the chaplains, priests, religious and other adults who served as animators. Today, there is a sense of distance and fear of youth engagement, felt by priests and laity alike, which can be traced to the scandals that have rocked the church and the policy around Protecting God’s Children. While there is good reason for this policy to be in place, we raised the question - are we at the point where Protecting God’s Children has become a barrier? There was consensus that this is an important issue that needs to be addressed.

In this intergenerational session, participants also voiced their own questions. The youth in the room would like to better understand why people do “bad” things. Others voiced the need to support immigrants as they navigate the US culture and systems.

The session ended with an introduction to Cardijn Associates and an invitation to continue the conversation.

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Panel Discussion - Catholic Youth Formation and Action - Some Reflections from Msgr. Robert J. Vitillo

Dear Friends of the YCS Family,

Greetings from the International Secretariat of the International Young Catholic Students (IYCS).

First and foremost, I convey to you the greetings and prayerful blessings of our International Chaplain, Rev. Fr. Justo de la Fuente Fernandez, who sends his warm greetings from Quito, Latin America, where he is currently on mission.

Today, we gather to celebrate the 80th Anniversary of the International Coordination of IYCS. As we commemorate this remarkable milestone, we also look forward to another historic celebration, the Centenary of the Young Catholic Students Movement in 2028, marking 100 years since its foundation.

The dream and vision of the early student leaders gave birth to this movement. The establishment of the International YCS Centre for Documentation and Information in Paris, the International Secretariat, and later, in the early 1970s, the Regional Coordinations strengthened the movement across the world. These developments have formed generations of leaders rooted in faith, values, commitment, and service.

I believe each one of us gathered here is a living testimony to this journey. Whether you have served as a student member, coordinator, animator, chaplain, donor, parent, or partner, the movement has shaped your life in one way or another.

We have come together today to sow a seed, a seed of hope, commitment, and vision. We trust that this seed will grow into a strong plant in the coming years and eventually into a mighty tree bearing abundant fruit. When we gather again during the Centenary of the International Coordination in 2046, we will proudly say that here in Maryland we sowed this seed with faith.

Dear members of the YCS family,

We may come from different countries, cultures, languages, and backgrounds, but one thing unites us all: our movement, YCS.

Each one of us joined this movement with a dream, a desire, an expectation, a spirit of friendship, a shared vision, and above all, one common methodology, See, Judge, Act.

The movement has transformed our lives. It has helped us reflect on our realities, confront our challenges, strengthen our faith, and make informed decisions for ourselves and for society.

Our world has changed dramatically. Today, knowledge and information are available at the touch of a mobile phone. This is truly one of the greatest achievements of modern technology. Technology has transformed almost every aspect of our lives and has accelerated human progress.

However, technology and innovation can never replace what truly makes us human, Magnifica Humanitas, the greatness and dignity of the human person.

Faith without action has no meaning. Young people should embrace technology as a tool for learning, service, innovation, and social transformation, while ensuring that it is guided by ethics, responsibility, compassion, and respect for every human person.

Our greatest investment should not merely be in buildings or structures. Rather, it should be an investment in people, in values, leadership formation, and the education of young people.

We must form young leaders with strong values so that they are empowered to give back to society with integrity, compassion, and commitment.

Today, we are here because of the dedication and commitment of the YCS Alumni who have made this historic gathering in the United States possible, the first major international celebration of the 80th Anniversary. What has brought us together today is not simply an event, but the movement itself.

The alumni understand that the future of YCS depends on the next generation. Every alumnus and alumna carries a testimony of how the movement transformed their lives. It is now our responsibility to ensure that future generations experience the same transformation.

When we celebrate the 100th Anniversary of the International Coordination, we will remember that the dream for the future of the movement was renewed here in Maryland.

We dream of establishing a global centre dedicated to leadership formation, values education, research, and accompaniment, a centre that will strengthen future generations of leaders. We envision an International Academy of Formation and Excellence and, perhaps, within the next decade, an IYCS University of Formation and Excellence dedicated to forming leaders rooted in faith, service, justice, and human dignity.

This is our dream.

A dream of forming leaders who will serve the Church and society with faith, competence, compassion, and integrity.

I believe that today, here in Maryland, we are sowing the seeds of that dream. May these seeds grow and bear abundant fruit for our movement and for the world.

At this important moment, I would also like to acknowledge with deep gratitude all the former international and regional leaders, chaplains, partners, donors, and friends who laid the foundations of the International Coordination and faithfully supported the growth of our movement.

We remember them with gratitude and prayer.

Finally, I invite each one of you to continue supporting the mission of IYCS by investing your time, expertise, experience, and resources in the formation of young people.

Let us accompany young people by listening to them, walking with them, and empowering them, not by imposing our ideas, but by understanding their realities, their hopes, and their dreams.

Together, let us continue building a movement that forms leaders committed to faith, justice, peace, and the dignity of every human person.

Thank you once again for your presence, your commitment, and your continued support.

May God bless you all, and may God continue to bless the International Young Catholic Students Movement.

Thank you.

Roshan Melwyn Lobo

Secretary General of IYCS-JECI

Presented this speech on 28th June 2026 during the 80th Anniversary Celebration of the International Coordination of IYCS at Silver Spring Maryland USA.

Good evening.

We gather here tonight in Maryland, in the heart of a nation shaped by movements of courage, conscience and conviction, to celebrate something extraordinary. We celebrate not merely an organization. We celebrate a movement: a movement born not in the corridors of power, but in the hearts of young people who refused to separate their faith from their lives.

We celebrate the International Young Catholic Students, the IYCS, and its 80 years of international coordination, a missionary role in the Church and society, particularly for our own personal transformation. Our primary role is to bring the teachings of Jesus to the world, today we are reminded of Mark 16:15: “Go into all the world and proclaim the gospel to the whole creation.” We have a vision to educate and train students through formation to work for solidarity, freedom, justice, and peace.

And we do so, at a moment of remarkable historical convergence. This year, the United States of America marks 250 years of independence: two and a half centuries since courageous men and women dared to believe that a new kind of society was possible: built on dignity, freedom and the conviction that every human being is created equal and endowed with God-given rights.

That spirit: the spirit of people who refuse to accept the world as it is when they know it can be better, is not so different from the spirit that has animated IYCS from its very beginning.

Introduction

As we prepare to celebrate one hundred years of the movement in 2028, it seems like a long time and yet, when we pause to consider what humanity has lived through, built, destroyed and rebuilt in that century, words feel almost too small.

We have witnessed the worst of ourselves: two World Wars, a Cold War that held the planet in anxious suspense, and conflicts that scarred every corner of the globe. We have seen empires crumble and nations rise from their ruins, peoples long silenced finally claim their rightful place in history.

Through it all, through every tremor that shook the foundations of the modern world, the Catholic Church stood as both witness and participant in history. In the darkest hours of the twentieth century, the Church faced pressures unlike any since the age of the martyrs: totalitarian regimes: (Fascist, Nazi, Communist) tried to silence her voice, close her doors and erase her influence from public life. Many priests, bishops and faithful lay people paid with their lives for refusing to bow to the idols of the age. Yet the Church endured.

And she did not merely survive, she renewed herself. The Second Vatican Council, convened by Pope John XXIII and concluded under Pope Paul VI, opened windows, invited dialogue and called the Church to read the signs of the times with fresh eyes, engaging the modern world with confidence in the Gospel.

The late twentieth century brought Pope Saint John Paul II, whose pontificate helped topple the Iron Curtain, evangelized a new generation and offered a luminous vision of human dignity rooted in God’s love. The Church has also walked through valleys of shadow, including the clergy abuse crisis: which demanded painful reckoning and continues to call for humility, accountability and deep reform.

Today, under Pope Leo XIV, the first Pope from the Americas, elected in May 2025, the Church enters a new and hopeful chapter: reaching to the margins, caring for creation and reminding humanity that every person bears the image and dignity of God.

We have seen breakthroughs in medicine, technology and human rights. We have connected the world, extended life, expanded freedoms and lifted millions out of poverty, yet new shadows have gathered: ecological challenges, social fragmentation, and a crisis of meaning in a world of endless noise.

So, we must ask: what does this century of upheaval, heroism, failure and renewal, in the world and in the Church teach us? And what does it demand of us, as disciples and citizens, standing at the threshold of a new era?

The answer is the same one the Church has proclaimed for two thousand years and never more urgently than now:

We are called to be people of hope.

I. Where it all began

To understand where we are, we must remember where we came from.

In the 1920s, as the world recovered from the First World War, a young Belgian priest, Father Joseph Cardijn, looked at young workers and dared to say: “You matter. Your dignity matters. Your faith and your daily life are not two separate things – they are one.”

From that conviction was born a simple, revolutionary method: See. Judge. Act.

Look at the world as it is. Measure it against the Gospel. Then do something about it. That method, forged in the factories of Belgium, quietly changed the Church forever.

II. A movement that shaped history

As the Young Christian Workers movement flourished, students caught the flame. Through the 1930s, YCS (Young Christian Students) groups emerged across Europe, Canada and the United States, young Catholic students who wanted to transform their world from the inside.

Then came the Second World War. Barely weeks after the guns fell silent, in November 1945, young people were already gathering in London, because that is what young people do: they refuse to give up.

At that World Youth Conference, two YCSers: Pierre Juneau from Canada and André Rauget from France began dreaming of something bigger. In September 1946, in Fribourg, Switzerland, during the Pax Romana General Assembly, representatives of eight YCS movements came together and the International Young Catholic Students was born.

Think about that: a world just emerging from the deadliest conflict in human history and Catholic students were already building bridges.

America was there from the beginning. Fr Louis Putz CSC of Notre Dame University, chaplain of College YCS USA, was present at the World Student Congress in Prague in 1945. When others attempted to manipulate and divide, he and his fellow YCSers stood firm, championed solidarity and helped lay foundations for the international movement we celebrate tonight. I had the privilege of studying his archives in Notre Dame University in Indiana and understanding the history of our movement in the United States.

We also remember today, Sally Cassidy, the only American in the International YCS, who after her graduate studies, worked at our office, who gathered information on the needs of post- war student. She returned to the U.S. in early 1948 specifically to organize an international meeting of the Young Christian Students in Chicago, which helped establish the national movement. She pursued a doctorate in Sociology at the University of Chicago. Her dissertation fieldwork compared French and American Catholic layman movements, and she later helped launch the Sociology Department at the Université de Montréal.

Our gratitude and prayers to the family and friends of our movement, particularly to those who served the International YCS. It’s to be noted that 71 individuals from 33 national movements contributed by sending their leaders and chaplains to serve the International YCS Secretariat in France, with highest from France with 8 members, followed by Brazil with 5 members, and Spain, Portugal, Switzerland and India with 4 members. Argentina, Canada, Lebanon, Nigeria, Uganda, Australia with 3 members. The International YCS is grateful also to all these national movements and its members, regional coordinators (past and present), animators and chaplains, many partner movements, we remember particularly IYCW, CIJOC and IMCS-Pax Romana, the many supporters and partners, funding agencies, CIDSE, the Bishops Conferences, Holy See and Secretariat of State who believed in our mission.

III. The Church was watching

There is a moment in our history that never fails to move me. In 1947, the Papal Nuncio to France: a diplomat, churchman, gentle and curious soul came to address a small gathering of IYCS members in Pontoise. His name was Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli. You may know him better as Pope John XXIII.

He watched these young students. He listened to them. He encountered their See–Judge–Act method. Something took root in him. Years later, as Pope, he called the Second Vatican Council, the most significant gathering of the Church in four centuries. At its heart was the very spirit Cardijn’s young people had embodied: the Church must read the signs of the times, engage the modern world and listen before it speaks.

This is why Cardijn was affectionately called “the grandfather of Vatican II.” The young people of IYCS helped shape the Church we know today.

IV. Walking through the storms

Our story has never been without struggle.

The upheavals of the 1960s and 70s, the end of colonialism, the Cold War, cultural revolutions, created a “generation gap” that cut deeply into Catholic lay movements. It was a season of turbulence that tested the faith and resilience of young Catholics everywhere.

Yet the movement did not retreat. Through the 1970s and 80s, IYCS spread to Latin America, Africa, Asia, the Middle East and Eastern Europe, carried by missionaries, travelling students and ordinary young people with extraordinary faith, committed to forming one another in Catholic Social Teaching.

The Church walked through her own shadows, including the clergy abuse crisis, which demanded, and still demands accountability, humility and reform. As a movement formed in the values of human dignity and truth, IYCS has always understood that fidelity to the Gospel sometimes means asking the hardest questions.

V. The blood of the faithful: martyrs of the movement

Before we speak of growth and reach, we must pause.

The story of this movement is written not only in minutes and declarations – it is written in blood. Across the decades, members and chaplains of YCS and other Catholic Action movements have paid the ultimate price for their faith and commitment, from Nazi concentration camps to zones of conflict, from Guatemala to South Sudan.

Among them is Jean Chavet, a young French student and YCS member, whose courage under forced labour, imprisonment and suffering led to his death in 1945 and to his recognition today on the path to beatification.

He stands for many chapains and student leaders who refused to let their faith become merely private or safe. Their witness asks us a simple question: if they gave everything, what are we prepared to give?

VI. In global solidarity

IYCS has played a crucial role in helping young people confront some of the most difficult realities of our times, from Apartheid in South Africa, to HIV/AIDS to violent conflict – through the lens of Catholic Social Teaching, while also fostering inter-religious dialogue and ecumenism.

In the peak years of the HIV/AIDS crisis, YCS groups in many countries used the methodology to help students to build awareness at the epidemic in their schools and communities, judge it in the light of the Gospel and the Church’s teaching on dignity, solidarity and care for the sick, and act with compassion and responsibility rather than fear or stigma.

At the same time, IYCS has formed young Catholics as peace builders across the world, organizing encounters, trainings and forums where students from different Christian traditions and religions reflect together on war, injustice and ecological threats and commit themselves to justice, freedom and respect for human dignity.

By bringing Catholic students into dialogue and common action with peers of other faiths, the movement shows that Catholic Social Teaching on human dignity, solidarity and the common good can become a shared language for cooperation, so that young people learn to see religious diversity as a resource for mutual understanding and become ambassadors of peace, reconciliation and hope in societies marked by stigma, conflict and division.

We took our values and voices to the consultations in United Nations Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) contributing to the economic, social, and environmental policies. We ensured student participation in deliberations in UNESCO (the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) by promoting world peace and security through international cooperation in education. Our engagement started with the UNESCO since 1947 annual conference for the international study for reconstruction of education within war- devastated countries.

VI. Here, in this country, at this moment

We are here tonight in Maryland, the very first state in this nation to pass a law guaranteeing religious freedom, a place where Catholics helped build the foundations of American democracy. It is deeply fitting that we celebrate IYCS here in the year of the 250th anniversary of American independence.

For what is the American experiment, at its best, if not the conviction that ordinary people: young people, people of faith, people from every nation, can come together and build something that has never existed before? That is what the student founders of IYCS believed.

Former YCS members living in this country have embodied that conviction quietly and faithfully across decades. We must pause tonight and honor them.

They are men and women formed by this movement gathered today across the globe, who now call the United States home. They came carrying not only suitcases, but values: the dignity of every person, the call to serve, the habit of seeing the world through the eyes of faith and acting with courage.

They are in parishes and universities and business environment. They are doctors and nurses who remember what it means to serve the poor. They are teachers who carry Cardijn’s belief in the dignity of every young person into their classrooms. They are community leaders and advocates who learned at a YCS meeting, perhaps decades and continents away that faith without action is incomplete. Tonight we say to them: your formation was not wasted. Your movement shaped you. Through you, it continues to shape this country and this world.

VII. For such a time as this: youth, technology, conflicts

We live in a remarkable and demanding moment.

Pope Leo XIV, the first Pope from the Americas, leads a Church called to go to the peripheries, to listen, to accompany. His election is a sign that the center of Christian gravity is shifting, the Global South is rising, and young people: your generation, are at the heart of what comes next.

The world you inherit is one of breathtaking possibility and sobering challenge. Artificial intelligence is reshaping work and creativity. Social media connects billions while isolating millions. The hunger for meaning: real, rooted meaning: has rarely been greater.

At the same time, conflicts and political violence wound communities across the world; propaganda and polarization can turn neighbours into enemies; young people often pay the highest price: as victims, refugees, and those whose futures are delayed.

Just as YCS has helped students face past crises with faith and responsibility, today it must help them face the challenges of technology and conflict with honesty, compassion and moral clarity.

And into all of this, YCS speaks with a voice one hundred years in the making: “You are not alone. Your faith is not private. Your actions matter. See the world. Judge it with the eyes of the Gospel. And act together.”

VIII. A charge to the young and to those who were young

So tonight, I want to speak to everyone in this room. To the young people: You are heirs of Cardijn’s revolution. You carry the legacy of students who stood up at Prague in 1945 when others tried to use them. You carry the spirit of those who sat with the future Pope John XXIII and unknowingly helped plant the seeds of a Council. You are part of a movement that has walked with the challenged, stood with students in conflict zones from Sudan to Palestine to Sierra Leone, and raised its voice at UNESCO and the United Nations.

Do not let anyone tell you that you are too young, too small or too insignificant to change the world. Father Cardijn once said every young person is a masterpiece of God. Masterpieces are not made to be hidden.

To the YCS & JEC former members: the alumni of this great movement now living and serving in this country: you are living proof that YCS works. The seeds planted in you sometimes in small, humble meetings, sometimes in difficult circumstances, in countries far from here: have borne fruit. In your families, professions, communities and faith, the movement lives on in you. We need you to tell your stories. We need you to mentor the next generation. We need you to remind the young people here that this formation lasts, that it builds people of lasting character and deep faith. The bridge between yesterday and tomorrow is built by people like you.

Conclusion

I want to conclude by reminding that 250 years ago, a new nation declared that freedom and dignity are not privileges: they are birthrights. One hundred years ago, a young Belgian priest declared that young workers and students are not objects of history, but its makers.

Tonight, in Maryland, those two great convictions meet and we are called again to put our faith into action through our life and our commitment to freedom and peace in the world.

We gather not to look backward with nostalgia, but to look forward with hope, the hope that is not passive but active, not wishful but rooted, not individual but together.

May we in Maryland, in America, and in 72 countries were the YCS exist across this beautiful, broken, beloved world, have the courage to answer it.

Peace be with you to all gathered here today in this school auditorium and who are connected with us online in advancing the mission of International Young Catholic Students (IYCS) to evangelize and transform the student milieu.

Thank you, and God bless you all.

*Manoj Mathew

Former Secretary General

International Young Catholic Students (IYCS) Jeunesse Étudiante Catholique Internationale (JECI) Juventud Estudiante Católica Internacional (JECI) 2003-2007

IYCS is a Catholic Action Movement of the Apostolate of Laity. It has a status of Private Juridical Personality according to Canons 298-311 and 321-329 of the Code of Canon Law. IYCS is recognized by the Holy See as an International Catholic Organization under the Dicastery for Laity, Family and Life. IYCS maintains close links with the Vatican Secretariat of State, particularly the section in

charge of relations with the States. The International Young Catholic Students movement has been registered in France under the 1901 association law.

mail@iycs-jeci.org www.iycs-jeci.org

In 1946, the IYCS secretariat was born in Brussels, Belgium. 80 years later, current IYCS Secretary General, Roshan Lobo (2024-2028), former IYCS Secretary General Manoj Mathew (2003-2007) and many former YCS members and leaders originally from many countries around the world, now residing in the US, came together in Silver Spring, MD to celebrate, and to remember. The event was the first time in recent memory that intentionally identified and brought together YCS alumni in the US.

Rejoicing together

Contributions by both current and former YCS members and chaplains made the event a memorable one. Fr. Jacob Anil D’sa (former IYCS Asian Chaplain) led a fun mixer that had everyone moving and smiling and helped everyone remember names. The mixer closed with a rousing song of praise, Alabaré, led by Rudy Dehaney.

The formal celebrations were launched with a beautiful traditional Bengali dance by three young students, choreographed by Ms. Shilpi Rozario (former YCS Bangladesh leader).

International Chaplain, Rev. Fr. Justo de la Fuente Fernandez, M.Id joined the celebration online with a Thanksgiving prayer he composed specially for the occasion, which he shared in Spanish. Elisabeth Gobu, (Cote D’Ivoire), also led a hymn of praise in French, Nous Chanterons Pour Toi Seigneur, emphasizing the international character of the IYCS and the celebration.

Keynote Speeches

In a stirring keynote speech, Manoj Mathew reminded us that through the profound social, political and cultural changes of the 20^th century, the YCS has never retreated.

As a movement formed in the values of human dignity and truth, IYCS has always understood that fidelity to the Gospel sometimes means asking the hardest questions.

Mathew highlighted the role of Fr. Louis Putz, CSC of Notre Dame University, who accompanied the World Student Congress, Prague in 1945, and Sally Cassidy, the only American who worked at the IYCS coordination office and then returned to the US to organize the 1948 IYCS meeting in Chicago which established the national movement.

Mathew also paid tribute to the men and women formed by YCS who now live in the US who are now professionals and community leaders and who now live out Cardijn’s belief in the dignity of every person.

Next, current IYCS Secretary-General Roshan Lobo, remarked on the bond that united all former and current YCS. Lobo went on to outline his hope for the future and called for investment in people and leadership formation rather than buildings or structures.

Cardijn Associates congratulates the IYCS for this historic milestone and embraces the call to support the formation of youth and young adults in a changing world. With the grace of God, we are excited to work with the global IYCS movement and explore opportunities at home with former alumni networks, and existing Catholic organizations and programs.

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Yesterday, Today and Always: Students Who Dare to Change the World

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