Yesterday, Today and Always: Students Who Dare to Change the World
Keynote address at the 80th anniversary of IYCS coordination
Dear Secretary General of International Young Catholic Students (IYCS) Roshan Lobo, Monsignor Robert J. Vitillo, Fr Anil Thomas D’Sa, Distinguished guests, beloved former members, friends, families, dear young people of faith,
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.