Specialized event at the Caritas children’s and youth home
Rheine. cpr. “Caritas is art!” This sentence of Lorenz Werthmann (1858-1921), founder and first president of the German Caritas Association, was heard for the first time by some participants of the professional event “Social work as a pilgrimage” at the Caritas Children’s and Youth Home. Pastoral theologian Prof. Dr. Martin Lechner from Benediktbeuern and Angelika Gabriel, education/counseling/accompaniment, Eggenfelden again accepted the invitation after 2010 to enrich an event in the main building of the institution on Unlandstraße with their impulse lectures.
Teacher as well as head of the working group religious education Annette Wiesmann and social pedagogue Frank Heße with assignment to support the Christian corporate culture coordinated the entertaining event. “Reflecting on and understanding social work as a pilgrimage is a challenge that we face again and again in different formats,” says Managing Director of Caritas-Kinderheim gGmbH Winfried Hülsbusch. Frank Heße adds that in a time of upheaval in church structures it is of great importance to make time, space and content available to employees of Caritas sponsorships if the valuable guidelines of the service providers are to be lived convincingly. It was good to be taken back to the roots of the German Caritas Association in Lechner’s lecture and to hear the words of its founder, Werthmann, on the essential characteristics of Caritas, which are more relevant than ever, even after 100 years.
On pilgrimages of various kinds in the traditional sense, the Caritas Children’s and Youth Home has been traveling for years, mainly in northern Spain and Germany, but also sometimes in Lithuania and France. The specialized meeting made possible for the participants to perceive their entire service deepening as pilgrim on the way also in the church context. Lechner called pilgrimage in the context of curative child and youth care courageous because of its clearly religious roots. At the same time, it could serve as a pedagogical method to raise the profile of a church institution. After further remarks, Lechner invited the participants to consider, internalize and realize their activity at Caritas, which according to Lorenz Werthmann (1910) is the most beautiful gem that the Church has to offer, in terms of this value. With pictures of her own pilgrimage experiences in Norway, Italy and Spain, Angelika Gabriel then made further connections between essential characteristics of pilgrimage and social work. From the formulation of goals, planning, appropriate equipment/food, paths, landmarks and encounters to arriving.
Participants reflected on these features later in the event during an hour-long “pilgrimage” with different interviewees and a subsequent “world café.” The final round of the professional event made it clear that the Caritas Children’s and Youth Home “understands its art” of being on the pilgrimage of social work with young people and their families as well as appropriate questions and answers locally, regionally, nationwide and internationally.