Cursillo has it origins in the coming together
of two things. Following the First World War, the Roman Catholic
Church in Spain experienced a decline in attendance at Mass
by men. A movement of young men called Catholic Action
was created. The objective of this movement was to reverse the
trend and bring men back to participation at the Mass. The young
men in Catholic Action on the Island of Majorca decided, for
their own spiritual benefit to undertake a pilgrimage to the
Shrine of St. James in Santiago de Campostela in the
north west corner of Spain. The pilgrim trail goes from Madrid
to Santiago through some of the most rugged portions of the
Pyranees. There are several monasteries along the trail established
to support the pilgrims on their way. Perhaps the best known
in this country is the monastery at Santo Domingo de Silos
which produced and performed in the Chant recordings of a few
years ago.
The plans for the pilgrimage were interrupted by
the Spanish Civil War and then by the Second World War, and in
1946, the young men from Majorca were able to make their pilgrimage.
They had found their spiritual preparation so useful that they
decided to continue. They continued to meet individually with
a spiritual director. They met weekly in small groups which they
called grupos (the Spanish word for meeting is reunion,
hence the group reunion) and in which they shared their Christian
life of the past week, made plans for the next, and held each
other lovingly accountable for carrying out those plans. Finally,
they met weekly in the larger community to witness to that Christian
community of their activities to transform the world. This larger
group meeting they named after the traditional greeting between
pilgrims on the trail to Campostela - Ultreya! Their
focus expanded from returning men to the Mass to transforming
the world to make it more Christian. In a short time, they decided
to invite others to join them. It was a failure. The new comers
had no common experience on which to base their sharing, and they
left discouraged. Rather than give up the idea, they studied and
planned an event that would give people the common reference for
their sharing.
Over the next several years, they devised a three
day experience. The pilgrimage to Campostela is known colloquially
as El Curso - the Course. They chose to call the
three days the Little Course, or Cursillo.
Like the Curso, the Cursillo is a course to be traveled, not a
course of instruction. The first Cursillo was held in 1949 at
the monastery of San Honorat on a mountain above Palma de Majorca,
and the basic structure has not changed since. Before long, the
whole movement took on the name of the three day experience. The
beginning of Cursillo, both historically and philosophically,
is in the Fourth Day, and it is living out our Fourth
Day that we fulfill the vision of the founders of Cursillo.