The organisation now known as the Catholic People's Weeks was founded in 1945 by a small group of priests and laity and has the main aim of helping ordinary Catholics to appreciate their faith more keenly and to live deeper and fuller lives in their homes, parishes and places of work. The original, and eventual, aim is to provide residential Catholic colleges for further education. The immediate need met by these study weeks has proved to be considerable and the organisation, which has Cardinal Godfrey as its Patron, has expanded rapidly in the last few years.

Our first introduction to this association was when we joined its group going for Easter to Worth Priory. Despite the high standard of chant in a Benedictine church, we were not to be mere spectators, for with great charity we were encouraged by the monks to participate fully in the liturgy.

We awoke in the aircraft high over the Southern Sudan, flew parallel to a tremendous red line of dawn, and touched down at Entebbe, on Lake Victoria, to a melodramatic roll of thunder. But the thunder did not quench or contradict the dawn: as even something so commonplace as a bunch of middle-school terminal examination papers goes to show. Perhaps school essays in King Alfred's school in the tenth century showed a similar dawn. Here are some extracts: first from a young girl, who wrote:

‘It is clearly seen that there are very many primitive people in this country. Poor people have no religion and they believe in spirits. Such are the people in my native land.

In 19541 went to live with my grandmother who was surrounded by Pagans. There was a village nearby in which there was a newly-married couple…

'He was well to do and lived a careless and worldly life in a military circle'. Dositheus is not the only young man to be described in these terms in any century. It is safe to say he is not the only one to have been converted by the fear of eternal punishment either. Perhaps in the twentieth century when the notion of hell is considered a naive superstition, such a conversion may be more rare, but Dositheus was born around the middle of the sixth when (we are pleased to think) people were not so civilized and enlightened.

The young man heard from his friends and soldier acquaintances a great deal of talk about Jerusalem and made up his mind to visit the city and see for himself whether ‘army language’ was exaggerating its attractions. He toured the chief sights and was duly impressed, but it was a flamboyant painting depicting the tortures of the damned that made him stand still and stare in Gethsemane.

There is a growing appreciation among the Catholic laity that their task in the world is the doing of God's work in and through the work of the world. In other words Christ's life must be actualised by the members of his body through a full participation in the life of the world. The constant narrowing of distance, wider horizons and the increasing independence of former dependant peoples are giving worldwide dimensions not only to problems of politics, economics and sociology, but also to the life of the Church.

Nearly thirty years ago the founders of Ad Lucem were already thinking along these lines. They saw the needs of the under-developed countries of the world, which includes two-thirds of its peoples, and they wanted desperately to help these areas in some way. This was long before current international thinking had begun; long before the idea of the United Nations Organization, and the world's consciousness of to the poverty of the under-developed countries.