Catholic Action (A. C.)

CATHOLIC ACTION (A.C.). - Organized Catholic apostolate of the laity.

I. CONCEPT

In the literal sense the phrase A. C. means an act conforming to the principles of the Catholic religion. But common usage and the official documents of the ecclesiastical hierarchy have in these times designated by this name either the works of the apostolate carried out by religious associations, or the associations themselves insofar as they are dedicated to such works. In the first sense Pius XI defined A. C. as: "The collaboration of the laity in the hierarchical apostolate of the Church."

In the second sense the General Statute of Italian A. C. of 1946 says that it is "the organization of the laity for a special and direct collaboration with the hierarchical apostolate of the Church." It should also be noted that today, through various forms of dependence and coordination, there is a tendency to link to A. C. properly so called also those associations which, although having an organization less rigidly modeled on the hierarchical one, carry out an action of the apostolate in some particular sector, as, for example, in Italy, the Scouts, the A.C.L.I., etc.

II. NATURE AND PURPOSE

The A. C., both as individual apostolate and as organized apostolate, is inserted into the economy of the Redemption established by Jesus Christ, by which its fruits reach men through the ministry of other men. "Go - said the divine Master to his Apostles - teach all nations, baptizing them..." (Mt. 28, 19).

Official and hierarchical is the ministry of the Apostles and of their successors, the Pope and the bishops, with their clergy; subsidiary and subordinate is that of the laity.

It follows that the purposes of the A. C. are the very purposes of the Church. Pius XI wrote to the Argentine episcopate (Nov. 4, 1931): "Most noble is the purpose of the A. C., since it coincides with the very purpose of the Church." And Pius XII affirmed: "High is the mission of the A. C., as one that lends its cooperation to the attainment of the very purpose of the Church."

Naturally to this general and supreme purpose, which is the coming of the Kingdom of God, there are connected, as proximate and partial purposes to the remote and general purpose, other purposes. First and fundamental is that of the religious and moral formation of the members, orienting them and spurring them to an integral Christian life. Second, and with an emphasis all its own, the A. C. wishes to give to its organized members an apostolic vision of life, so that each one may feel himself a living part of a whole - the Church - from which he continually receives and to which he continually returns spiritual goods. Thirdly, the action of apostolate properly so called in all sectors and toward all those directions in which the collaboration of the laity with the action of the hierarchy is from time to time more urgent.

Essential external notes of the A. C., as it is found today throughout the Catholic world, are the form of organized apostolate, and the form of organization corresponding to the organization of the ecclesiastical hierarchy.

In times in which organization lies at the basis of all expressions of life, the absolute autonomy of individual activities of good would be a cause of dispersion of forces and of scant efficacy of action. And since these forces of the laity placed at the service of the Church had to be organized, one could not, as a general rule, disregard the very organization of the Church, which is catholic, that is, universal, and which besides the universal primacy of the Pope has in individual nations the dioceses and the parishes, with the respective mission of the bishops and the parish priests. Hence the parochial basis existing in many places for the organization of the A. C. Then the diocesan bodies alongside the bishop, and the national bodies with coordinating and promoting functions alongside a bishop delegated for this by the Holy See, or elected by the episcopate of the nation, or else alongside a collegial body (Episcopal Commission) as now in Italy.

Under the pontificate of Pius XI there was also a first attempt at international organization at the center of catholicity, with the Actio catholica, an office created in Rome, but which has had scant function. Today forms of organization for the individual branches are taking shape: such as the International of Catholic Women's Leagues and Pax romana already existing, and the International of men and of youth of new institution (Sept. 1948).

III. HISTORY

Taken in its broadest meaning, it can well be asserted that Catholic Action has always existed within Christianity and that it is in fact part of its intimate structure. It has been constantly in operation from the moment when Jesus' blessings made public among the people, notwithstanding his momentary prohibitions, the wonders of which they themselves had been the object or witnesses. The collaboration of the laity, men and women, in preparing the ground for the Apostles, in defending them and shielding them from persecutors, in making themselves champions of the Gospel, in unmasking heretics and false brethren, although rather scanty in authentic particulars, emerges as admirable from all the hints of the ancient historians. Their mutual charity, their courage in professing the faith and in bearing witness to it through martyrdom were the constant and effective seal of the holiness of the doctrine and the most effective coefficient of propaganda. With the decline, however, of Roman civilization and with the changing of public and private relations, it almost seems that the religious activity of the laity is somewhat eclipsed before that tenacious, though sometimes hidden, activity of the clergy and of monasticism; it rises again, instead, with the turning of the new times, when the great Mendicant Orders, especially of the Franciscans and Dominicans, know how to stir up new energies in defense of the faith, for the comfort and protection of the humble, the poor, the unfortunate. Third orders, confraternities, charitable institutions of various kinds almost surpass the more limited and circumscribed provisions of the preceding age. Social provisions such as those of the "Humiliati," guilds of arts and crafts always pervaded by a Christian spirit, form the new environment through the work precisely of the laity, especially the men; the female element still contributes to it in a rather indirect way, although an ever greater freedom of initiative also emerges on its part. The Renaissance, especially in Italy, perfects and broadens what it inherited from the preceding age, certainly less in the social field of the guilds than in the field of charity and culture. Alongside the Monti di Pietà there is the broader movement for free schools of all levels, the broader and more perfect organization of charity in favor of the most wretched and abandoned, the "Compagnies of Christian doctrine," in which the laity participates by initiating, promoting, contributing in person and with resources.

But it is with the tumults provoked by the French Revolution that Catholic Action begins in the strictly specific sense of its name. Politics and economics, science, philosophy, education seek their foundations, their informing motives in rationalism, in unbridled hedonism. The ancient paths of the apostolate are largely barred: the guilds dissolved, religious institutes suppressed, Catholic schools closed. And from the invading machinism and triumphant capitalism arises the social question, with the first revolutionary apostles, the first socialist theorizations, the first insurrectional attempts.

But here and there the Catholic counteroffensive takes shape. In Italy the seeds are sown of what would later be modern Catholic Action with the Amicizie cattoliche of Pius Brunone Lanteri, which the Piedmontese King dissolved in 1828 as dangerous to the State. Then come the energetic stances of the Church with the encyclical Mirari vos of Gregory XVI (1832) and then with the Syllabus of Pius IX (1864). The Catholics, having authoritatively received the sure line of march, return to the conquest of a society that does everything to ignore Christianity. In all European nations the religious revival is almost simultaneous and sees the finest names of the clergy and the laity in fraternal collaboration of efforts. In France the Ligue catholique pour la défense de l'Église; in Belgium the Union catholique; in Germany the Katholischer Verein; in Switzerland the Piusverein, in England the Catholic Union, in Spain the Asociación de católicos, to cite only some initiatives of the time. This return of Catholic initiative between '48 and '60 culminates in an international Congress at Malines in 1863, with the most illustrious pioneers such as Montalembert, Vaughan, Mermillod and for Italy the lawyer G. B. Casoni of Bologna, who then promotes in his homeland the first Catholic organization of a national character, called the Associazione cattolica per la libertà della Chiesa in Italia.

These various Catholic organizations remained still, for over a decade, predominantly in the field of the defense of Catholic truth and promoted the Christian life of the members. These were the times that preceded and followed the fall of the temporal dominion of the Popes, the struggle of the Kulturkampf in Germany, the Commune of Paris, and which in the minds of many anticlericals were to be the last throes of life of the Catholic Church. But already the pioneers were tracing the paths of modern social thought, inspired by the principles of the Gospel. In Germany in '48 the parish priest Ketteler, later a famous bishop, dealt with the "Christian concept of property" and in '64 openly confronted the theme "the workers' question." In Switzerland another bishop, later a cardinal, Mermillod, sounded the alarm among the beati possidentes, setting forth new duties and new rights of the social classes, and his too was a proposal at the Vatican Council for the condemnation of socialism and the affirmation of the laws of Christian justice and charity.

In England another figure of bishop and cardinal, Manning, who more than any other sees clearly and far ahead, poses plainly to Catholics the problem of "coming out of the Ark and acting on the world." In North America another cardinal, Gibbons, becomes the defender of the new organization The Knights of Labor, undermined and accused even by Catholics.

With these lights on the path, Catholic Action sets up its plans of social work and the connected works. So that when, on May 15, 1891, the famous encyclical Rerum novarum of Leo XIII is published, the ideological and practical ground is ready to receive it.

Meanwhile, however, within the Church there creep movements of ideas that disturb even the consciences of militant Catholics. In France there had already been, under Gregory XVI, the deviation and defection of the abbot de Lamennais, and this had served to purify from dross the democratic and social-renewal ferment, so that the names of Lacordaire, of the Count of Montalembert, of La Tour du Pin, of the Count De Mun, stood to represent a vast movement of ideas and works. In Germany the struggle unleashed by Bismarck, pompously called Kulturkampf, after 1870, had only strengthened the union of Catholics and given Windhorst, leader of the Catholic Center, the opportunity to stand firm against the "Iron Chancellor" and to defeat him and force him to abolish the anti-Catholic laws. The attempt at internal disintegration by the so-called "Old Catholics" headed by Döllinger was vain also because of these external circumstances of defensive struggle which Catholics had to face.

Italy, where the political situation was entirely particular because of the relations between the Holy See and the government, was a more favorable ground for sowing elements of discord. This was the reason that Leo XIII in the encyclical Graves de communi, while reconfirming the social directions of the apostolate of the laity, recalled the most heated, led by Fr. Murri, to a sense of greater discipline. Pius X intervened later with the encyclical Il fermo proposito, and it was a return to the spiritual and supernatural sources of all the action of Catholics (v. AZIONE CATTOLICA ITALIANA).

The First World War and the postwar period oriented the whole of Catholic Action toward works of assistance and patriotic resistance and then toward organizational recovery. This received its greatest impulse under the pontificate of Pius XI, the great pontiff who was also called the Pope of Catholic Action. Beginning with his first encyclical, the Ubi arcano Dei, and up to his death, he carried out a mighty work of doctrinal clarification and practical orientation of all the Catholic forces of the world. There followed a more homogeneous regulation of the national organizations, a more lively adherence of these to the ecclesiastical hierarchy, while each nation nonetheless preserved the particularities imposed by local circumstances.

The period in which the struggle against Catholics was unleashed in the name of totalitarian political ideologies (fascism and Nazism in Italy and Germany, communism in Mexico and Spain) marked the necessity for Catholics to withdraw momentarily from certain advanced positions, in the social and political field, in order to defend the substance of the Christian ideal in the face of the invading and overbearing State, in expectation of better times. When the Second World War came, the European Catholic organizations felt to the full the disastrous events of the conflict. Engaged on the one hand in surviving and on the other in carrying out a feverish activity of material and moral assistance to the afflicted populations, they well deserved of the Church and of the Fatherland. With the end of the war, the organizational recovery, as well as, in the individual nations, the effort to adapt to the new demands of the apostolate, have been impressive. While in Europe social problems dominate, exacerbated by the misery of the postwar period, in America (north and central-south) the religious and moral apostolate engages the various organizations in a marked way, so that, in this decisive turning point of the social and political life of the world, the Catholic laity is not on the margins but at the center of humanity in movement, and truly appears as the collaborator of the hierarchy in preparing the advent of the kingdom of Christ.

IV. LEGAL CONDITIONS

These can be considered under two aspects: that of the internal law of the Church and that of external public law.

The CIC has no canon concerning Catholic Action, because even where it treats De fidelium associationibus (cann. 684-725; v. ASSOCIAZIONE), it legislates only on those which by their constitution bear a strictly ecclesiastical character, whereas Catholic Action has a lay character. The juridical position of Catholic Action must therefore be inferred from the living source of the Church's magisterium, that is, from the acts of the ecclesiastical hierarchy. From these acts, and above all from those of the Holy See, Catholic Action takes its organizational physiognomy, and on the basis of the same it regulates its relations with the other associations existing in the Church. In Italy it is called, by the statutes approved by the Holy See, "the principal ordering" of militant Catholics.

As for the position of Catholic Action with respect to the national community and the State, the matter, a very delicate one, was regulated under Pius XI by numerous concordats. Since it is of the nature of Catholic Action to be a leaven of the social body through an organized apostolate, whose high directives emanate from the ecclesiastical hierarchy, the ease of clashes and misunderstandings on the part of the modern State with secularist tendencies appears evident. Since the generic appeal to the freedom of militant Catholics within the ambit of the common law has many times not been sufficient, because of the frequent limitations and violations of that freedom on the part of the State itself, the Holy See sought between the two world wars to obtain an explicit recognition of Catholic organizations in the concordats stipulated. Thus in the Concordat with Latvia (1922) Catholic Action was spoken of for the first time, then in that with Lithuania (1927), with Italy (1929), with Germany (1933), with Austria (1934). But of all this solemn pact very little now remains, because of the collapse of almost all the contracting states. The Concordat with Italy, however, has been confirmed by the new republican Constitution in art. 7. It is not possible to foresee whether the path thus begun will be resumed and followed; in any case it is certain that, in a regime of freedom and democracy, the best defense of Catholic Action is Catholic Action itself, efficient and therefore capable of influencing and determining public opinion and the legislator.

V. CONSTITUTIVE CHARACTERISTICS

Although it is Catholic, that is, universal, in its motives and its general aims, the organization of militant Catholics under the direct dependence of the hierarchy takes concrete forms answering to the tendencies and traditions of individual nations. Nevertheless it is easy to discern certain common characteristics and certain specific differences.

Common characteristics. — Catholic Action is an organization of laypeople with "their own responsible executive functions"

(Pius XII to Italian Catholic Action, 1946). This means that, unlike what is proper to religious associations, in Catholic Action it falls to the laity to bear the honor and the burden of translating the directives of the hierarchy into concrete works of apostolate. In such organizations the priest has the function of representing ecclesiastical authority, of securing the spiritual formation of the members by promoting the initiatives destined to that end, and finally of safeguarding therein the integrity of the direction as regards faith and morals. Everything else, whether in the sphere of study or of organization and action, belongs to the laity.

Catholic Action stands outside and above political parties (Benedict XV, 8 Jan. 1919; Pius XI to the ordinaries of Italy, 2 Oct. 1922; to the patriarch of Lisbon, 10 Nov. 1933; Pius XII to the president of the G. I. A. C., 12 March 1943. Cf. the Concordats with Austria, Germany, Italy, etc.), even while it provides the social and political education of its members and carries on political action itself when politics "touches the altar" (Pius XI, 20 Sept. 1925). In that case the politics of Catholic Action is the very politics of the Church, that is, religious action in the political field. It may happen that at a given historical moment there is agreement between the practical stance of Catholic Action and that of a political party on certain social problems, but this detracts nothing from the value of the principle.

Specific differences. — Centralized organization is proper to the Latin nations, with the exception of France and Belgium; decentralized organization is characteristic of Catholic Action in the Anglo-Saxon countries.

The unitary and interclass character by which, for example, the whole mass of youth is organized in one national association, all women in another, is found in Italy, Spain and the Ibero-American nations; the class character, organizational specialization and therefore the federative form are found in the Anglo-Saxon world.

The same should be noted for the parochial character of the associations, understood in the sense that the first and fundamental nucleus of the organizational structure lies in the parish, and this is found where the parish is still a reality of associated religious life, as in Italy and in certain Latin nations, whereas it is not found where the parish either is no longer or has never been concretely a living and communal entity felt by the faithful.

Even more varied are the formulas that structure the individual branches of Catholic Action in the various nations, but here more than ever it is a question of that adaptability which is proper to every healthy and vital organism. Let it be added that within the same nation different circumstances may indicate new organizational formulas, while the fundamental characteristics of the general structure of Catholic Action remain intact. Thus it happened also in Italy after the First World War, during the Fascist regime and in the postwar period (cf. the Storia dell'A. C. I. in the manual of L. Civardi, II).

History: T. Veggian, Il movimento sociale cristiano nella seconda metà del sec. XIX, Vicenza 1902; F. Olgiati, La storia dell'A. C. (1865-1904), 2nd ed., Milan 1922; E. Soderini, Leone XIII, 3 vols., ibid. 1932-33; A. De Gasperi, I tempi e gli uomini che prepararono la «Rerum Novarum», ibid. 1945.

Law: cf. the most widespread commentaries on the CIC under the title De laicis; A. Perugini, Concordata virginia, Rome 1934; D. Menicucci, Natura giuridica dell'A. C., ibid. 1936; J. N. Gienechea, Principia iuris politici, ibid. 1939; V. Falzone, F. Palermo and F. Cosentino, La Costituzione della Repubblica Italiana, ibid. 1948.

Luigi Cardini