CHRISTIAN SOCIAL DOCTRINE. - In recent centuries, in the face of increasingly grave violations of Christian ethics in the economic and social sphere, the principles of Christian sociology have been clearly reaffirmed by the popes and by Catholic scholars, and their realization has been indicated as the sole path to salvation for the contemporary world. The renewal of society will take place—such is Catholic thought—only through the renewal of souls and the subordination of economics to Christian morality: the emancipation of economics from morality has in fact led to the errors and injustices of liberalism. Upon its ruins a new social order will arise; this, however, must not be based upon the principles of Marxism which, founded upon materialism, leads to the excessive power of the State and contempt for the human person.
The Christian social order, on the other hand, is founded upon recognition of the dignity of the human person; this must be protected against the excessive power of money or of the State. Property, whose principal foundation lies in labour, must serve the preservation and perfection of the human person and be an instrument and guarantee of freedom. It becomes instead an instrument of oppression and servitude when it is abused, when its social function is disregarded and it is accorded only an individual function. Christian thought therefore does not admit an « ins utendi et abutendi » and condemns individualistic abuses as well as unrestrained freedom of competition, which allows only the strongest to survive, and these are often the most dishonest. The State must therefore intervene in order that such abuses may not occur, by proceeding to nationalize enterprises which entail economic predominance and which cannot be left to private citizens without danger to the common good, and by placing limits upon excessive property, that is, upon the concentration of wealth.
The social question must be resolved in such a way as to protect the proletarian from the abuses of proprietors and capitalists, and thus to enable the proletarian himself to attain property, both through the spread of small agricultural property and through forms of workers’ participation in the ownership and profits of enterprises. The most urgent problem is therefore the protection of the proletarian. In correspondence with his duty to work, work must be assured to him: he has a right to work. This cannot be regarded as a commodity, because it is bound up with the person of the worker: starvation wages fixed solely with regard to the law of supply and demand are therefore unjust. Wages are moreover always unjust when they do not ensure the worker’s maintenance; indeed, he has a right to a family wage enabling him to support his dependants.
Within the limits now indicated, the wage system is lawful; it is not, however, the best system: there is therefore a tendency to evolve from the wage form to the associative form. Only the overcoming of the wage system can in fact wholly destroy the predominance of capital, which in recent centuries has failed to recognize the prevailing rights of labour. Efforts must therefore be made to have workers participate in the profits of the enterprise and to ensure that these profits are invested in shares of the enterprise itself, so that the workers may become its co-owners. Participation and share ownership are, like co-operation and the spread of small rural property, means tending to bring proletarians closer to property and to unite capital and labour in the same hands. The Christian social school indeed aims at the abolition of the condition of proletarians and hopes for a society of proprietors. It holds that property should be extended, insofar as possible, to all, since all have the duty of promoting the development of their own person and therefore have the right to dispose of those means necessary for its affirmation.
Proletarians must be permitted, not only for their own protection but also for their own advancement, to join together both in simple associations of workers alone and in mixed associations comprising all those interested in a particular form of production. These associations, which will tend toward the religious, moral, social, and economic defence and improvement of the worker, must exist within the State and be recognized by it, but they must not belong to the State. The Catholic social school indeed combats every excessive power of the State and therefore also opposes the totalitarian, complete, and violent nationalization of the means of production and exchange; it instead advocates gradual nationalization limited to large enterprises.
These, in summary, are the principles advocated by the Christian social movement which spread throughout Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century. It had already attained considerable diffusion when Leone XIII, with the Reum Novarum of 1891, approved it, inviting all Catholics to follow II. The Catholic social movement arose as a reaction, on the one hand, to the injustices and disastrous consequences of the capitalist regime and, on the other, to the anti-Christian doctrines of socialism, which sought to eliminate those injustices. It therefore arose first in countries such as Germania, Francia, and Inghilterra, where capitalism, already around 1848, was revealing its power and its iniquity, while Marxism was emerging and spreading among the proletariat, which saw in it the sole voice condemning the economic system of which it was the victim. The Catholic reaction was thus imposed by the new economic situation and made itself heard through the attacks of a Ketteler, a Manning, and a Vogelsang against rampant industrialism, harmful to the souls and bodies of workers.
In Germania, where as early as 1845 A. Kolping had begun to create workers’ associations, the Catholic social movement spread chiefly through the work of mons. Ketteler, bishop of Magonza from 1850. In 1869 he demanded for workers a reduction of the working day, higher wages, the prohibition of labour by children and mothers, and admitted the weapon of the strike.
The movement subsequently spread through the work of such men as Dasbach, Brandts, Winterer, Moufang, founder of the « Associazione per il benessere dei lavoratori », Hitze, head of the social works of München-Gladbach, Hertling, Schings, and through newspapers such as the Germania, the Christlich-soziale Blätter, directed by Abbot Schings, and the Arbeiterwohl, founded in 1880 and the organ of the association of Catholic employers, whose president was Franz Brandts and whose secretary was Hitze. Thus came the establishment of the « Volksverein » (1890) and the bold social legislation proposed in Parliament by the deputies of the Catholic centre, directed by Windthorst.
Two currents were distinguished within this party: one of them, led by Franz Hitze, demanded, like the Austrian group of the Vaterland and like the French Christian Socialists, the corporative regime and the omnipotence of the State, which was instead opposed by the other group headed by Hertling. Hitze subsequently abandoned his medievalist ideas, which the centre had never made its own.
They triumphed instead in Austria, where every confidence was placed in the social monarchy and the landed nobility. Christian social ideas in fact won broad favor among the Catholic federalist conservatives who fought the centralist, industrialist, and secularist liberals; the struggle against the latter then became intertwined with that against the Jews, who possessed so large a share of Austria’s movable wealth. The corporatist ideal was therefore championed by the chief organ of the federalists, the Vaterland, and by the men who gathered around it: Baron Carlo Vogelsang, Count Falkenhayn, Count Blöme, Count Kuefstein, Count Belcredi, Prince Liechtenstein, and Carlo Lueger, mayor of Vienna; their teacher was the Protestant economist Meyer. The social legislation promoted by these men (who secured the eleven-hour working day) distanced from them a portion of the feudal elements, but won them broad sections of the lower middle classes, which gave birth to the Vereinigte Christen and, in 1894, to the Christian Social Party.
In Switzerland the movement was promoted by Cardinal Mermilod, bishop of Geneva. In 1868 he had delivered lectures on the social question in Paris; at the First Vatican Council he supported both the cause of infallibility and that of the workers. His work was continued by Gaspare Decurtins, who was likewise an intransigent Catholic and a supporter of infallibility. A Catholic deputy from the Grisons, he repeatedly attempted to induce the Federal Council to take the initiative in establishing international labor legislation (from 1880 onward), a project envisioned by Emperor William II.
The Belgians were perhaps the Catholics furthest removed from the statism of the Austrian corporatists. Not only the economist Carlo Perin, who was very close to liberalism, but also Christian social figures such as Woeste and Pottier had no intention of granting excessive powers to the State. Through the efforts of Monsignor Douteloux, bishop of Liège, that city hosted the great international Catholic congresses, at which men such as Hitze, Winterer, Kuefstein, Blöme, De Mun, La Tour du Pin, and Medolago Albani spoke and confronted one another over the State’s role in the social question: the two opposing tendencies of the interventionists and the anti-interventionists. Turning to practical action, while the University of Louvain established chairs of social sciences, guilds arose in the cities and trade unions in the countryside, the former federated in the Belgian Democratic League and the latter in the Boerebond (v.) or federation of farmers. Some went too far: Abbé Daens, deputy for Aalst and a fiery Christian democrat, judged Rerum novarum insufficient, and went so far as to be invited to lay aside his ecclesiastical habit (1897).
The Dutch Catholics competed with those of Belgium and Germany in social action and in the numerous institutions protecting the working classes. The most distinguished figure was that of Abbé Schaepman (1841–1903).
In England the figure of Cardinal Edward Manning stands out. He intervened to settle the « docks » strike (August 1889) and, especially in his Leeds speech (1874) on « the dignity and rights of labour », upheld the principles of Christian socialism: elimination of the abuses of capital, of the concentration of wealth, and of large estates; the right to work; reduction and regulation of working hours; establishment of a minimum wage; and the spread of cooperativism. Such was the man who inspired the encyclical Rerum novarum. In 1885 Monsignor Bagshave set forth, in « Mercy and justice to the poor. The true political economy », ideas even more audacious than those of Manning.
The Catholic social movement also spread to Ireland, where emphasis was placed on the problem of the countryside; to Spain, where it nevertheless achieved very little development; and to North America, where Cardinal Gibbons prevented the condemnation of the « Knights of Labor », a nonconfessional trade-union organization. Condemned in practice by the bishops of Canada and by the Holy Office, because they believed it to be a secret society, the Gibbons defended it and restored it to good standing in Rome (1888).
In France social tendencies had already appeared among the liberal Catholics (Ozanam, Lacordaire...); but the problem was posed more clearly by the « Association catholique » of Alberto De Mun and La Tour du Pin. Two currents consequently came to be distinguished among French Catholics: that of the conservatives and that of the social Catholics.
The former followed the liberal economists or those liberal-minded Catholics who had F. Le Play as their teacher and who rallied around Claudio Jannet’s journal Réforme sociale. These Catholic conservatives exalted patronage and condemned all State intervention; they enjoyed the support of the higher clergy, large landowners, and many industrialists of northern France. From this current emerged the « Angevin School », which began under the auspices of Monsignor Fressel (1827–1891), bishop of Angers, and adhered to a certain conservatism.
The social Christians of the « Association catholique » and of the « Opera dei circoli cattolici di operai », on the other hand, tended to grant broad powers to the State and to the corporations. La Tour du Pin’s strictly corporatist ideal, which rested on the premise of a monarchical restoration, nevertheless encountered opposition from Réforme sociale, Revue catholique des institutions et droit, Etudes, and Léon Harmel himself, one of the foremost implementers of Christian social ideas and owner of the Val de Bois factories.
The Christian democrats, who appeared at the end of the previous century, were close to the Christian social Catholics in the social sphere, but distant from them in the political sphere. Their ideas were disseminated by Justice sociale (Naudet), Vie catholique (Dabry), Revue du clergé français, Annales de philosophie chrétienne, Quinzaine, Démocratie chrétienne, Demain, and Sillou, directed by Marc Sangnier. Between 1908 and 1910 this movement was shaken by the repression of modernism, for which many Christian democrats had expressed sympathy. The Catholic democrats did not suspend their political and social activity and, having initially regrouped in the Popular Democratic Party and in the « Young Republic » movement, later joined with other Catholic currents, such as that of Jeunesse française, to create in 1944 the Popular Republican Movement, which, almost continuously from 1945 onward, participated in the government of France through its representatives (Bidault, Schumann).
Some Italian Catholics (Tommaseo, Rosmini, Ricasoli...) had grasped the importance of the social question in the first half of the nineteenth century; political events diverted them from II. The spread abroad of a Catholic social movement and of a threatening Marxist movement also aroused in Italy—despite its economic backwardness—a renewed Catholic interest in the social question, which was often confused with the politico-religious question, just as laissez-faire was confused with the liberalism of politicians and philosophers. The most daring social positions were therefore generally adopted by the intransigent Catholics, avowed enemies of the liberalism in power; more cautious, with some exceptions (Curci), were the transigent or liberal-minded Catholics (Cantù, Zanella, Fogazzaro, Bonomelli...). The Catholic social movement consequently developed in Italy within the « Opera dei congressi ». In 1877, while Cardinal Pecci, bishop of Perugia, was condemning the Manchester system in a pastoral letter, free associations of workers were being advocated at the Congress of Bergamo. In 1889 the « Unione cattolica per gli studi sociali in Italia » and its organ, Rivista internazionale di scienze sociali e discipline ausiliarie, were founded; both were promoted and directed by Giuseppe Toniolo.
The encyclical Rerum novarum and, to a lesser extent, the rise in Italy of a Socialist party gave vigorous impetus to the social activities of Catholics. The intransigent newspapers (Osservatore cattolico, Unità cattolica, Italia reale...) began to support the Christian social cause ardently; meanwhile Catholic professional associations were developing, especially through the work of young students and professionals, who began to use the term «Christian Democracy» (v.). The struggle among the various Catholic tendencies and the dissolution of the Opera itself, which took place in 1904, did not suffice to halt the Catholic social movement. The Catholic organizations dependent on the Unione popolare and the Unione economico-sociale, whose development was encouraged by the clerical-liberal agreements—which reversed the advantageous position often enjoyed until then by the red leagues—had, by the end of the First World War, considerable numerical strength and were a source of concern to socialists and conservatives. In 1919, following the dissolution of the Unione economico-sociale, the autonomous Confederazione italiana del lavoro was founded; it subsequently suffered violence at the hands of the reds and the blacks. The program of the Partito Popolare Italiano, too, was inspired by the ideas of the Christian social school. After the fall of Fascism, those ideas re-emerged in the programmatic formulations of the Democrazia cristiana, the Associazioni cattoliche dei lavoratori italiani (ACLI), and the Libera confederazione generale italiana del lavoro (LCGIL).
The Catholic social movement, whose development in the various nations has been traced here, was approved and encouraged by the pontiffs.
The Rerum novarum (15 May 1891) and the other pronouncements of Leo XIII provoked a remarkable expansion of the movement, which underwent a serious crisis between 1907 (Pius X’s encyclical Pascendii) and 1910 (the condemnation of the Sillon), when many of its valiant supporters were caught up in the condemnation of modernism. It flourished after the First World War in accordance with the teaching imparted by Pius XI in Quadragesimo Anno (15 May 1931) and Divini Redemptoris (19 March 1937), and by Pius XII in Sertum laetitiae (1 Nov. 1939) and in many of his Christmas and Pentecost messages. The doctrines enunciated by the Pontiffs today inspire the activity of trade-union movements and political parties in many nations.