The Australian YCW and the Cardijn Community Australia will host a commemorative mass to mark the 75th anniversary of the official foundation of the Melbourne YCW on 8 September 1941.
Fr Bruce Duncan CSsR, director of the Yarra Institute for Religion and Social Policy will celebrate the mass with us.
Welcome to join us for this historic occasion.
Following the mass, we plan to go for dinner at the Lord Newry Hotel.
Melbourne YCW 75th Anniversary1941 – 2016
Commemorative Mass
with Fr Bruce Duncan CSsR
7pm
Thursday 8 September 2016
YCW House
537 Brunswick Street
North Fitzroy, 3068
Phone: 03 9489 4387
Historical note
In around 1937, Kevin T. Kelly, a member of the Campion Society, began the earliest known efforts to start jocist groups for teenage male young workers in Melbourne.
In 1940, Fr Frank Lombard also took up and built on these initiatives. Within a year, Archbishop Daniel Mannix had approved the transformation of the existing Catholic Boys Legion into the YCW. The same year, a jocist girls' movement began also in Melbourne that would eventually take the name of the National Catholic Girls Movement (NCGM), the forerunner of the Girls YCW.
Fr Lombard chose the date of 8 September 1941, celebrated liturgically as the Feast of the Nativity of Our Lady, as the symbolic date of the birth of the Melbourne YCW. Therefore, it’s a fitting date to celebrate both the original birth of the Melbourne YCW and its rebirth today.
“We are always beginning again” - Joseph Cardijn
