Serendipity: Webster tells us serendipity is an aptitude for making “desirable accidental discovery.”

This “desirable accidental discovery” has been on my mind and heart for the last couple of days and nights, ever since I thought about the 40th anniversary of Humanae Vitae, our recent article on Cardinal Joseph Cardijn, and Pat and Patty Crowley’s involvement with both the encyclical and Cardijn.

In his modest 185 pages of the book on Pat and Patty, titled Simple Gifts, John Kotre followed the couple’s journey into the heart of the lay apostolate, starting from a world far removed from Cardijn’s hard-scrabble neighborhood in the factories of Belgium.

Joseph’s father worked two jobs as a coal merchant and caretaker to ensure that his son could complete his studies in the seminary and become an ordained priest. At his father’s death, Joseph was twenty-one years old, and remarked about that sorrowful time:

I resolved at his deathbed to consecrate myself to the salvation of working youth and the working class. This now became the guiding motive of my life.

While the Church appeared to turn her back on the slave labor provided by Belgium’s youth, Marxism did not. The children to whom Cardijn taught catechism would soon lose interest and after a few days, never came back.

Cardijn persuaded a group of them to return weekly to report about their experiences in the factories. Then, he taught them to follow the precepts of Thomas Aquinas: Observe, Judge, Act, and before long, he had organized three- thousand seamstresses to form a group called Young Christian Workers.

In trying to side-step the highly conservative Curia, Cardijn took his theory of organizing the youth of the world to Pius XI in 1925. By 1937, thirty-thousand workers from 87 countries gathered in St. Peter’s Square in Rome.

Christian workers were to serve workers. If farmers, they were responsible for farmers; if students, for other students. Like were to serve like.

Meanwhile, a German Holy Cross seminarian, Louis Putz, studying in Paris, spent one year before ordination and three years after ordination working in the industrial regions surrounding Paris in the “red zones,” so called because of the large communist presence among the workers.

Putz explained, “You had to be a communist to amount to anything. You couldn’t gain social security or social welfare at all if you were not a Communist. For four years, Putz followed Cardijn’s Inquiry method, organizing teenage workers into Christian cells.

Because he was a German citizen living in France, to avoid the draft, Putz left at the outbreak of the Second World War, emigrated to the United States, and was given his congregation’s assignment at Notre Dame, where Cardijn’s name was becoming familiar on the campus.

Since he was unsure where to begin, Putz organized a handful of Notre Dame graduates into a cell, called Catholic Action Students. Eventually, he began meeting with six businessmen downtown, and Monsignor Hillenbrand, who taught liturgy at Mundelein Seminary, and did the same with the laymen. Shortly afterwards, the encyclical on the Mystical Body of Christ was published.

The men decided that since all were married, they might begin by concentrating on marriage and why the divorce rate was soaring in Chicago They tried to use Cardijn’s method of inquiry to see what could be done about the problem.

Patty was not impressed: “Absolutely ridiculous! The men were never at home, and they were talking about marriage. We would go to party, and Pat would have a few martinis and talk about the Mystical Body.”

She didn’t realize that a mustard seed was being planted, from which men and women, world-wide would come together to build the laity’s Church, as powerful as Dominic’s Domnican Order, or St. Ignatius’ Jesuits. Religious and laity worked together, and anyone blessed to have been part of that union will never forget the joy, companionship, and sense of purpose. All were welcome. Could such a miracle happen again this day?

Please. Lord, take pity on your people and show us the way home, walking together, loving one another, one step at a time. Amen.

(To be continued)

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