POTTIER, ANTOINE. — Sociologist, born at Spa (Belgium) on 22 February 1849, died in Rome on 24 November 1923. A boarder at the Collegio Capranica in Rome (1868–1875), he obtained degrees in philosophy and theology from the Gregorian University.
Ordained a priest in 1874, he was professor of moral theology at the Grand Séminaire of Liège from 1879 to 1902, when illness forced him to give up teaching. Settling in Rome, he engaged there in extensive social activity as a lecturer, contributor to newspapers, ecclesiastical assistant to the Unione cattolica del Lavoro (1910), founder or promoter of mutual-aid societies, cooperatives, and professional organizations for tramway workers, nurses, street cleaners, shop assistants, etc., and of more than ten women’s professional unions. He also held, succeeding Msgr. Radini-Tedeschi, the chair of sociology at the Collegio Leoniano (1905–15). In 1900, in Liège, he published a treatise De iure et iustitia, an excellent commentary on the encyclical Rerum novarum (1891). Head of the so-called Liège school, the antithesis of the Angers school, he founded the Unione democratica cristiana di Liegi (1892), giving it a program of social and political demands (1893), much of which was already implemented by Belgian legislation. P. advocated the family wage in 1890 and, later, employee share ownership. Around 1920 he established a school in Spain with the Grupo de la democracia cristiana. Among P.’s other publications are: La coopération et les sociétés ouvrières (Liège 1889); L'Eglise et la démocratie chrétienne, in Les directions pontificales et la démocratie chrétienne, by G. Goyau, G. Toniolo, A. P. (ibid. 1901); La Questione operaia, I (Rome 1903); La morale catholique et les questions sociales d'aujourd'hui, I (Charleroi 1920, Italian ed. Milan 1921), II (Bruxelles 1921).