Listening in Action: Global Catholic Lay Movements and the Review of Life Method
The Review of Life, the core methodology of a dozen international lay movements, is an overlooked spiritual resource that engenders practices of listening within contemporary global Catholicism. Many readers will be familiar with the more popular application of the method, the see-judge-act, and its various iterations, including the pastoral circle and action-reflection-action, but few know its historical roots as an inductive, participatory method for small groups with a distinctive spirituality of action. As the church continues down the synodal path, the Review of Life offers a helpful reminder of the importance of listening in action.
Models of Participatory Ecclesiology
The modern approach of the see-judge-act was developed and refined in study circles of young women and men workers in the early part of the twentieth century. With the help of a priest chaplain, Joseph Cardijn (1882-1967), these young adults offered a response to the injustice and suffering of the industrial era. Eventually, as new groups were formed, a movement coalesced and it became known as the Young Christian Workers (YCW) or Jeunesse ouvrière chrétienne (JOC). Unlike other pastoral approaches to the working class, the young workers in this mode, many without formal education, were given a dignified space to share, analyze, and lead communal responses to the injustice in their lives. In the 1940s, it was young workers in the French JOC who proposed the term Review of Life to describe what they were doing, as recalled by a former JOC chaplain, Bishop Georges Béjot: “Thus, the review of life was not a ‘method’ conceived at the summit by informed educators and proposed by the movement but an inspiration from the grassroots, born from the experience of militant, apostolic life.”
With an inductive and participatory approach, this specialized or “JOCist” model uplifted an approach that Vatican II later described as the “apostolate of like to like” (Apostolicam Actuositatem, no.13). Every baptized person, even a young woman working in a factory, can become an apostle to their peers and can lead a movement.
As young workers aged out, adult groups were formed and youth in other “milieus” organized specialized movements along the same models. Today, there are a dozen lay movements in this tradition including those for workers, farmers, students, professionals, children, and families. (see list)
At the spiritual and practical foundation of these ecclesial spaces is a shared spirituality of action. Cardijn framed this according to what he described as “three truths.” The truth of life, the lived experiences of the young workers (or whatever target population) finds itself in contradiction with the truth of faith. This truth points to the fullness of God’s Reign preached and initiated by Jesus Christ. In the face of this contradiction or dialectic between a reality too often marked by suffering and the vision of the Reign of God, Cardijn points to a third truth, the truth of action. What is needed to confront this contradiction, he insisted, is organized action on the part of young people:
Leaders and members learning to see, judge, and act; to see the problem of their temporal and eternal destiny to judge the present situation, the problems, the contradiction…; to act with a view to the conquest of their temporal and eternal destiny. To act individually and collectively, in a team, in a local section, in a regional federation, in a national movement, in meetings, in achievement, in life and in their environment, forming a single front… (Cardijn, Three Truths 1935).
The Review of Life and Synodality
The Review of Life, especially when understood in connection to this participatory spirituality, offers at least three resources for listening in the context of synodality today.
First, like the Conversations in the Spirit method, the Review of Life encourages the creation of small Christian communities, where listening and discernment are critical components. Globally, there are thousands of such groups linked to these movements. The method is intentionally inductive with a privileged position given to the experiences of the poor and marginalized.
For those who practice the Review of Life using the traditional see-judge-act approach, local groups offer spaces for members to share experiences, traditionally called “facts” from their lives. One or more of these experiences may then be analyzed in light of the Gospel and actions are proposed to address in some way the issue and root causes. These, in turn, are then evaluated in subsequent meetings. These can create a much more profound synodal experience than many experience in our local churches. In speaking with representatives of the national French movements in 2022, Pope Francis praised the method and recognized this point. “Through their history, our Catholic Action movements have developed genuine synodal practices, especially in team life which forms the basis of your experience.”
In Japan, for example, where many young workers experience a sense of isolation, one unemployed youth recently shared his experience with the YCW:“I have a hard time expressing myself. I am afraid to mix with other people, especially in crowded places and I have to stay away from people to avoid panic attacks. I joined YCW Japan because I wanted to share and express my worries and hardships with fellow young people and to deepen my understanding of our situations.”
Like the YCW, the other youth movements recognize the urgency to foster intentional community spaces among young adults. In France, the Jeunesse Indépendante Chrétienne Féminine, a national branch of the JIC that maintains a specialized focus on young women, describes its role in this way: “Life moves quickly and sometimes it is good to stop and think about what is happening to us, what we want to experience…We enjoy getting together as girls when we truly look at our desires, our hopes, our convictions, and our fragilities.
Second, the Review of Life engenders communal sentiments that go beyond the local to build solidarity across communities and borders. In the Review of Life, people often discover both the interdependence that Fratelli tutti describes as well as the need to organize to address deeper structures of sin. In response to these insights, the lay movements have created international networks based on shared “specialized” identities. These usually involve international congresses using inductive methods to examine the reality facing their members at the local levels.
In July of 1921, after the First World War, students from more than twenty countries convened for a peace conference in Fribourg, Switzerland and founded the International Movement of Catholic Students (IMCS-Pax Romana). Nearly a century later, this student-led movement continues to network students across borders. In 2024, for example, the IMCS Asia Pacific region organized a training for student leaders from Sri Lanka, India, Nepal, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Timor Leste, the Philippines, Uganda and Kenya on peace. At the same time, the movement has recently opened an International Youth Training Centre in Chiang Mai, Thailand.
Again, like the local level, it is members of the target milieu who are in leadership roles. For MIJARC, the movement of young farmers, the leaders are young farmers. For the Christian Family Movement, leadership roles are shared by couples. Among the youth movements, this is a distinctive element from those youth ministries and secular civil society groups that are directed by older generations. The youth movements of specialized Catholic action are movements of, for, and by the target group itself. This is a distinctive feature, but it can also be challenging to sustain some projects with decreasing numbers of available chaplains to offer support.
Finally, the Review of Life methodology is orientated towards action. This evangelically outward impulse seeks to go beyond sharing and discernment to transformative action. Importantly, this action does not need to be large scale. The movements constructively distinguish between actions and activities, with actions being those tasks undertaken with intentionality and reflection.
Locally, this looks different depending on the local context and needs. In Egypt, for example, the YCW recently launched a project “to empower young women between the ages of 14 to 22, training them in handcraft, art and needlework, raising their efficiency and integrating them into the labor market, allowing them to have a positive impact on the family’s economy.”
In Zimbabwe, the National Movement of Catholic Students, a member of IMCS, launched a campaign to get more students involved in the election, entitled Pray, Register, Vote. The effort has included a series of webinar discussions on topics including, Empowering Youth with Disabilities in Democratic Processes and Youth in Power: Youth Quota as a Catalyst for a Progressive Youth Agenda.
For nearly all the movements, this attention to action has propelled them to become involved in international advocacy. Most have some formal status with the United Nations Economic and Social Council or one or more specialized UN Agencies (UNESCO, FAO, ILO, etc.). This status allows them to share the experiences of people on the ground with those in positions of power, to work with other civil society actors in lobbying for change, and to bring global issues back to local groups.
The advocacy work of the youth movements are particularly noteworthy, as they are some of the few global NGOs led for and by youth themselves. At one of the recent meetings of the United Nations Human Rights Council in March 2024, for example, IMCS hosted a team of Sri Lankan Human Rights Defenders and issued several statements during the session. A few weeks earlier, the Secretary General of the IYCS, addressed the 42nd UNESCO General Conference to advocate for “universal internet access and holistic education.” Meanwhile, the IYCW, CIJOC and MMTC are among a small group of non-governmental organizations to regularly participate in the annual meetings of the International Labour Conference in Geneva.
Within the church, these movements have taken on similar roles. In 1963, Pope Paul VI made the historic move of appointing a group of lay auditors - or listeners - to the Second Vatican Council. While the small group of men (and later women) who comprised this cohort were appointed in a personal capacity, nearly all held or once leadership roles in international lay movements. In November 1963 the pope, who had previously been a national chaplain to one of the groups, explained his rationale for choosing those representatives and used language operative in the movements of specialized Catholic action to describe the council:
“It seemed to Us, following Our unforgettable Predecessor John XXIII, that a few qualified representatives of the laity could and should be associated, as auditors, with this great ‘review of life', and admitted to sit at the Council. And We turned first to the movements which represented it with the most authority and on a larger scale: the International Catholic Organizations.”
In recent decades, however, the relations between the international lay movements and Vatican leadership has not been easy, especially in the 1980s and 1990s after many of the movements were closely involved in the development liberation theology. For some, there were concerns that the lay movements were reducing the church’s mission only to a social justice program, with a few local groups moving away from an explicitly Catholic focus. At the same time, movement leaders feel misunderstood or even abandoned by the church leadership. Many felt marginalized as the Vatican appeared to favor the so-called “new ecclesial movements.”
In a recent statement, over 100 leaders from the movements lamented the “lack of participation by international lay movements in the First Assembly of the Synod on Synodality” and the failure to create representative and participatory structures in the church after the Vatican II. The signatories to the text called for a renewed focus on the idea of the lay apostolate, which they see as having “largely disappeared from Church vocabulary, particularly in English, where it has been displaced by a growing emphasis on ‘ministry.’” For the movements, the notion of ministry, even lay ministry, can center power on the trained professionals and programs developed from above. The lay apostolate, by contrast, especially when seen through the inductive and action-oriented Review of Life methods, puts the focus and responsibility in the hands of the lay people themselves and their experiences of God in the world.
With more than a century of experience, these movements, and their Review of Life methods, offer much to the global church in its search for a renewed path ahead. While there has been a decline in some of the lay movements, especially in parts of Europe and the Americas, specialized Catholic action remains an important structure to facilitate listening in action. Scholars, lay leaders, and those involved in the Synod, as the recent statement urges, would do well to reflect on the insights from the Review of Life method and renew a sense “the lay apostolate and the development of structures representing lay people, their movements and communities at every level of the Church.”
The International Movements of Specialized Catholic Action
● Workers
• International Young Christian Workers (JOCI)
• International Coordination of the Young Christian Workers (CIJOC)
• World Movement of Christian Workers (MMTC)
● Farmers
• International Movement of Catholic Agricultural and Rural Youth (MIJARC)
• International Federation of Rural Adult Catholic Movements (FIMARC)
● Middle Class
• International Independent Christian Youth (JIIC)
• International Movement of Apostolate in the Independent Social Milieus (MIAMSI)
● Children and Family
• International Movement of Apostolate of Children (MIDADE)
• International Confederation of Christian Family Movements (ICCFM)
● Students and Intellectuals
• International Young Catholic Students (JECI)
• International Movement of Catholic Students (MIEC-Pax Romana)
• International Catholic Movement for Intellectual and Cultural Affairs (MIIC-Pax Romana)
● Other
• Cardijn Community International (CCI)
Kevin Ahern, PhD is a professor of Religious Studies at Manhattan College in New York, where he directs the Dorothy Day Center for the Study and Promotion of Social Catholicism. He is the author of Structures of Grace: Catholic Organizations Serving the Global Common Good and editor of several books. Kevin has served in leadership of several national and international organizations, including the International Movement of Catholic Students and ICMICA-Pax Romana.