Christian Social Doctrine
In recent centuries, faced with increasingly grave violations, in the economic and social spheres, of Christian ethics, the popes and Catholic scholars have clearly reaffirmed the principles of Christian sociology and have pointed to their realization as the only path to salvation for the contemporary world. The renewal of society will occur—this is the Catholic view—only through the renewal of minds and the subordination of the economy to Christian morality: the emancipation of the economy from morality has indeed led to the errors and injustices of liberalism. Upon the ruins of this system, a new social order must arise; it must not, however, be based on the principles of Marxism, which, founded on materialism, leads to the overweening power of the state and to the contempt for human personality.
The Christian social order is instead founded on the recognition of the dignity of the human person; this dignity must be safeguarded against the excessive power of money or of the state. Property, whose principal foundation is labor, must serve the preservation and perfection of the human person and be a means and guarantee of freedom. It becomes instead an instrument of oppression and servitude when it is abused, when its social function is ignored, and when it is recognized only as an individual right. Christian thought therefore does not admit an *ius utendi et abutendi* and condemns individualistic abuses as well as unrestrained freedom of competition, which allows only the strongest—often the most dishonest—to survive. The state must therefore intervene to prevent such abuses, proceeding to the nationalization of enterprises that wield preponderant economic power and cannot be left in private hands without danger to the common good, and by placing limits on excessive property, that is, on the concentration of wealth.
The social question must be resolved in a way that protects the proletarian from the abuses of property owners and capitalists and allows the proletarian himself to attain property, whether through the diffusion of small agricultural holdings or through forms of worker participation in the ownership and profits of enterprises. The most urgent problem is therefore the protection of the proletarian. To this end, in accordance with the duty to work, he must be assured work: he has a right to work. This cannot be treated as a commodity, since it is bound to the person of the worker; starvation wages fixed solely with regard to the law of supply and demand are therefore unjust. The wage is moreover always unjust when it does not assure the worker his subsistence; he has, rather, a right to a family wage that allows him to support his dependents.
Within the limits now indicated, the wage system is licit; it is not, however, the best system: the aim is therefore the evolution from the wage form to the associative form. Only the overcoming of wage labor can indeed destroy entirely the predominance of capital, which in recent centuries has disregarded the preeminent rights of labor. One must therefore strive to allow workers to share in the profits of the enterprise and to invest these profits in shares of the same enterprise so that workers become co-owners. Worker shareholding, cooperativism, and the diffusion of small rural property are means aimed at bringing the proletarian closer to property and uniting capital and labor in the same hands. The Christian social school aims indeed at the abolition of the proletarian condition and hopes for a society of property owners. It is held that property must be as widely diffused as possible, since all have the duty to promote the development of their person and therefore have the right to dispose of the means necessary for its affirmation.
Workers must be permitted, not only for their own protection but also for their elevation, to form associations, whether simple associations of workers alone or mixed associations including all those interested in a given production. These associations, which will aim at the defense and improvement of the worker in religious, moral, social, and economic terms, must exist within the state and be recognized by it, but must not be of the state. The Catholic social school indeed opposes any excessive power of the state and therefore also opposes totalitarian, integral, and violent state control of the means of production and exchange; instead, it advocates gradual nationalization limited to large enterprises.
These are, in summary, the principles advocated by the Christian social movement that spread throughout Europe in the second half of the 19th century. It had already achieved considerable diffusion when Leo XIII, with *Rerum Novarum* (1891), approved it, urging all Catholics to follow II. The Catholic social movement arose in 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 aimed at the elimination of those injustices. It first took root, therefore, in countries such as Germany, France, and England, where capitalism, by around 1848, was revealing its power and its iniquity, while Marxism was arising and spreading among the proletariat, which saw in it the only voice condemning the economic system of which it was a victim. The Catholic reaction was thus necessitated by the new economic situation and made itself heard through the attacks of figures such as Ketteler, Manning, and Vogelsang against the rampant industrialism that was deleterious to the souls and bodies of workers.
In Germany, where as early as 1845 A. Kolping had begun to create workers' associations, the Catholic social movement spread especially through the efforts of Monsignor Ketteler, bishop of Mainz from 1850. In 1869, he demanded for workers the reduction of the workday, the increase of wages, the prohibition of child and maternal labor, and admitted the use of the strike as a means.
The movement then spread through the work of men such as Dasbach, Brandts, Winterer, and Moufang, founder of the Association for the Welfare of Workers, Hitze, head of social works in München-Gladbach, Hertling, Schings, and through newspapers such as *Germania*, the *Christlich-soziale Blätter*, edited by Abbot Schings, and *Arbeiterwohl*, founded in 1880 and the organ of the Association of Catholic Employers, which had as its president Franz Brandts and Hitze as its secretary. This led to the establishment of the *Volksverein* (1890) and to the bold social legislation proposed in Parliament by the deputies of the Catholic Center Party, led by Windthorst.
Within this party, two currents distinguished themselves: one of them, led by Franz Hitze, demanded, like the Austrian group of the *Vaterland* and the French Christian-Socials, the
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corporate regime and the omnipotence of the state, which was opposed instead by the other group led by Hertling. Hitze later abandoned his medievalist ideas, which the Center Party had never embraced.
They triumphed instead in Austria, where all trust was placed in the social monarchy and the landed nobility. Christian social ideas indeed gained wide favour among Catholic federalist conservatives who fought the centralist, industrialist and secularist liberals; the struggle against these was then conflated with that against the Jews, who held so large a part of Austrian movable wealth. The corporatist ideal was therefore championed by the federalists’ leading organ, the *Vaterland*, and by the men gathered around it: Baron Karl Vogelsang, Count Falkenhayn, Count Bilimek, Count Kuefstein, Count Belcredi, Prince Liechtenstein and Karl Lueger, mayor of Vienna; their master was the Protestant economist Meyer. The social legislation promoted by these men (who secured the eleven-hour day) alienated some of the feudal lords but won over broad petty-bourgeois strata that gave rise to the *Vereinigte Christen* and, in 1894, to the Christian-Social Party.
In Switzerland the movement was promoted by Cardinal Mermillod, bishop of Geneva. He had delivered lectures on the social question in Paris in 1868; at the Vatican Council he upheld both the doctrine of infallibility and the cause of workers. His work was continued by Gaspard Decurtins, likewise intransigent and an upholder of infallibility. As a Catholic deputy from the Grisons, he repeatedly sought to induce the Federal Council to take the initiative for an international labour legislation (from 1880 onwards), a project cherished by Emperor William II.
The Belgians were perhaps the Catholics most distant from the statist corporatism of the Austrians. Not only did the economist Charles Périn, close to liberalism, but also Christian-Socials like Woeste and Pottier refuse to grant excessive powers to the State. Thanks to Monsignor Doutreloux, bishop of Liège, the great international Catholic congresses were held in that city, where speakers included Hitze, Winterer, Kuefstein, Bilimek, De Mun, La Tour du Pin, Medolago Albani, and the two opposing tendencies regarding the State’s role in the social question—interventionists and anti-interventionists—clashed. In practical terms, while the University of Louvain established chairs of social science, guilds arose in the towns and unions in the countryside, the former confederated in the Belgian Democratic League and the latter in the *Boerebond* (q.v.) or farmers’ federation. Some went too far: Abbot Daens, deputy of Aalst, a fiery Christian democrat, judged *Rerum novarum* insufficient and was eventually invited to lay aside his clerical habit (1897).
Dutch Catholics vied with those of Belgium and Germany in social action and in the many institutions for the protection of the working classes. The most outstanding figure is that of Abbot Schaepman (1841–1903).
In England the figure of Cardinal Edward Manning stands out; he intervened to resolve the dockers’ strike (August 1889) and, above all in his Leeds speech of 1874 on “the dignity and rights of labour,” upheld the principles of Christian socialism: the elimination of abuses of capital, the concentration of wealth and large estates; the right to work; the reduction and fixing of working hours; the establishment of a minimum wage; and the spread of cooperativism. Such was the man who inspired the encyclical *Rerum novarum*. In 1885, in *Mercy and Justice to the Poor. The True Political Economy*, Monsignor Bagshaw enunciated ideas even bolder than Manning’s.
The Catholic social movement spread also to Ireland, where emphasis was placed on rural problems; to Spain, though there it had very limited development; and to North America, where Cardinal Gibbons prevented the condemnation of the Knights of Labor, a non-denominational trade union. Condemned in fact by the bishops of Canada and the Holy Office as a secret society, Gibbons defended it and vindicated it in Rome (1888).
In France social tendencies had already appeared among liberal Catholics (Ozanam, Lacordaire…), but the problem was posed more clearly by the *Association catholique* of Albert de Mun and La Tour du Pin. Among French Catholics two currents thus came to be distinguished: that of the conservatives and that of the social Catholics.
The former followed liberal economists or those liberal Catholics who took Frédéric Le Play as their master and looked to the journal *Réforme sociale* of Claudio Jannet. These conservative Catholics extolled patronage and condemned any state intervention; they enjoyed the support of the higher clergy, large landowners and many industrialists in northern France. From this current emerged the “Angevin School,” begun under the auspices of Monsignor Fressel (1827–1891), bishop of Angers, and adhering to a certain conservatism.
The Christian-Socials of the *Association catholique* and the *Œuvre des cercles catholiques d’ouvriers* tended instead to grant wide powers to the State and to corporations. La Tour du Pin’s rigidly corporatist ideal, resting on the premise of monarchical restoration, however met opposition from the *Réforme sociale*, the *Revue catholique des institutions et du droit*, *Études*, and even from Léon Harmel himself, one of the chief exponents of Christian social ideas and owner of the Val de Bois works.
The Christian democrats, who appeared at the end of the last century, were close to the Christian-Socials in the social sphere but distant in the political. Their ideas were spread by *La Revue sociale* (Naudet), *La Vie catholique* (Dabry), the *Revue du clergé français*, the *Annales de philosophie chrétienne*, *La Quinzaine*, *Démocratie chrétienne*, *Demain* and the *Sillon*, directed by Marc Sangnier. Between 1908 and 1910 this movement was shattered by the repression of Modernism, to which many Christian democrats had shown sympathy. The Catholic democrats did not suspend their politico-social action and, first grouped in the *Parti démocratique populaire* and the *Jeune République* movement, later merged with other Catholic currents such as that of the *Jeunesse française* to give life in 1944 to the *Mouvement républicain populaire*, which almost uninterruptedly from 1945 has participated in the government of France with its men (Bidault, Schumann).
Some Italian Catholics (Tommaso, Rosmini, Riccardi…) had glimpsed in the early nineteenth century the importance of the social question, but political events drew them away 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 new interest among Catholics in the social problem, which often became conflated with the politico-religious one, just as free-trade liberalism was conflated with the liberalism of politicians and philosophers. The boldest social positions were therefore generally taken by intransigent Catholics, declared enemies of the liberalism in power; more cautious, except for a few exceptions (Curci), were the transigent or liberal Catholics and those of Cantù, Fogazzaro, Bonomelli… The Catholic social movement in Italy thus unfolded within the *Opera dei congressi*. In 1877, while Cardinal Pecci, bishop of Perugia, condemned the Manchester system in a pastoral letter, free associations of workers were advocated at the Congress of Bergamo. In 1889 the *Unione cattolica per gli studi sociali in Italia* was founded, together with the *Rivista internazionale di scienze sociali e discipline ausiliarie*, its organ; 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 a vigorous impetus to Catholic social activities. The intransigent newspapers (*Osservatore cattolico*, *Unità cattolica*, *Italia reale*, etc.) energetically championed the cause of Christian social teaching; meanwhile, professional Catholic associations were developing, especially through the efforts of young students and professionals who began to use the term "Christian Democracy" (v.).
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The struggle between various Catholic tendencies and even the dissolution of the Opera in 1904 did not succeed in halting the Catholic social movement. Catholic organizations dependent on the *Unione popolare* and the *Unione economico-sociale*, fostered in their development by clerical-liberal agreements that reversed the advantageous position often enjoyed until then by the "red leagues," had by the end of the First World War acquired considerable numerical strength and alarmed both socialists and conservatives. In 1919, following the dissolution of the *Unione economico-sociale*, the autonomous Italian Confederation of Labour was founded, which later suffered violence from both the "reds" and the "blacks"; even the program of the Italian People’s Party was inspired by the ideas of the Christian social school. After the fall of Fascism, these ideas reappeared in the programmatic formulations of Christian Democracy, the Italian Catholic Workers’ Associations (ACLI), and the Free General Italian Confederation of Labour (LCGIL).
The Catholic social movement, whose development in various nations has been traced here, was approved and encouraged by the popes.
The *Rerum novarum* (15 May 1891) and other declarations of Leo XIII provoked a remarkable expansion of the movement, which experienced a severe crisis between 1907 (*Pascendi* encyclical of Pius X) and 1910 (condemnation of the Sillon), when many of its staunch supporters were caught up in the condemnation of Modernism. It flourished anew 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 November 1939) and in many of his Christmas and Pentecost messages. The doctrines enunciated by the popes today inspire the action of trade union movements and political parties in many nations.