Catholics for Labor

The trouble with us [the Church] in the past has been that we were too often allied or drawn into an alliance with the wrong side. Selfish employers of labor have flattered the Church by calling it the great conservative force, and then called upon it to act as a police force while they paid but a pittance of wage to those who work for them. I hope that day has gone by. Our place is beside the workingman.

They are our people, they build our churches, our priests come from their sons.

--George Cardinal Mundelein of Chicago, 1938.

Last week U.S. Catholics celebrated the 50th anniversary of the first great labor encyclical, Leo XIII's Rerum Novarum ("Concerning New Things"), and the tenth anniversary of its sequel, Pius XI's Quadragesima Anno ("Forty Years After"). In these two documents the Roman Catholic Church said its say about social reform, and with its age-old flexibility took steps to adapt itself to 20th-century social change as it had to feudalism in the Middle Ages and to capitalism after the Reformation.

When Leo wrote in 1891 the great enemy was Socialism; when Pius wrote in 1931 it was Communism; in 1941 it is Naziism--and the Catholic Church seems well aware that some ism or other will always tempt working people away from the creed of Christ the Carpenter unless Christianity has a better message for them. Said the late famed British Monsignor William Francis Barry:

"If I am asked how Christianity is to be brought to the masses I reply, 'Show them how they can be saved by it . . . in this world, then perhaps they will believe you about the next; but until you do, they never will.' "

Revolutionary for its times was Leo XIII's Rerum Novarum. Only five years previously the Holy See had itself forbidden Canada's Catholics to join the Knights of Labor (forerunner of the A.F. of L.), and it took the prompt and vigorous intervention of the late great James Cardinal Gibbons of Baltimore to keep the Vatican from extending the ban to U.S. Catholics. In 1887 Dr. Edward McGlynn, pastor of Manhattan's biggest Catholic parish, had been excommunicated for supporting Henry George's single-tax proposals.* And ten years after Rerum Novamm's publication no Catholic seminary in the U.S. had even elementary courses in economics and sociology.

In this labor-fearing world of 1891, Leo's encyclical accepted the necessity of labor unions and the occasional justification of strikes, urged decent wage standards. State regulation of industry, more equal distribution of wealth, broader ownership of property, and much else that was "radical" then. Forty years later, calling Rerum Novarum "the Magna Charta of all Catholic activity in the social sphere," Pius XI confirmed, developed and enlarged it in Quadragesimo Anno.

Last week's anniversary celebration was a national symposium at Kansas City on "The Good Life in an Industrial Era." Sponsor and chairman was able, energetic, pro-labor Bishop Edwin Vincent O'Hara, who as a young priest in Oregon helped draft the U.S.'s first minimum-wage law and became the defendant in Stettler v. O'Hara when the law was tested and upheld in the U.S. Supreme Court. In 1931 he was the only American bishop present when Pius XI delivered Quadragesimo Anno, and spoke for the U.S. as delegates from each Christian nation reported the effects of Rerum Novarum. "I often think," he says, "of the contrast between that pilgrimage of representatives of free labor and of today when free labor organizations practically have disappeared in Europe." Chief instrument in U.S. Catholicism's attempt to put the labor encyclical into practice is the Social Action Department of the National Catholic Welfare Conference. This is a hardworking, zealous, frequently criticized, progressive little group which in the past 20 years has published 190 pamphlets and 30 books, held 80 regional conferences on industrial problems, operated twelve schools to train the Catholic clergy in labor, social, economic and church doctrine, promoted labor schools which teach ethics and economics to workers rounded up by cooperating parish priests, developed parish study clubs on a nationwide basis, held two national social-action congresses. Its director is Monsignor John Augustine Ryan, 72, who for more than a generation has led the struggle to put the encyclicals into practice.

What the N.C.W.C.'s Social Action Department does in the cities, the National Catholic Rural Life Conference does for country Catholics. "The cure for Communism is to give a man a cow," says its executive secretary, Monsignor Luigi Ligutti. He told the Kansas City conferees about his group's efforts to increase people's ownership of productive property through homestead projects, farmers' cooperatives and small, decentralized industries.

Today the encyclicals are finally bearing fruit. Auxiliary Bishop Bernard James Sheil of Chicago posed the alternative in 1939 when he addressed a C.I.O. mass meeting of packinghouse workers which inaugurated a national drive to unionize the packers: "If the Catholic Church does not do its duty, workers may have to depend on isms." And last year the N.C.W.C.'s administrative board, which represents the whole American hierarchy, roundly stated: "The first claim of labor, which takes priority over any claim of the owners to profits, respects the rights to a living wage." Pius XI's admonition on the social apostolate to workers in Quadragesima Anno--"All candidates for the sacred priesthood must be adequately prepared to meet it by intense study of social matters"--is also being heeded. Practically every Catholic seminary now provides courses in economics and sociology.

What the half-century has accomplished was summed up by Monsignor Ryan in the keynote speech at Kansas City: "The attitude of the working classes and the organized labor movement in our country toward Catholic social doctrine and the Catholic Church . . . is, with insignificant exceptions, one of complete trust and friendship. At present there seems to be not the slightest danger that Catholic workmen will become alienated from the Church as they have become alienated in some countries of Europe.

American Catholic wage earners realize that the Church is their friend and that the social doctrine of the Church offers them a full measure of justice. . . .

"We admit, indeed, and deplore the fact that these great Papal pronouncements were, for many years, neglected and ignored by many Catholics; but we ee in the present anniversary celebrations a bright hope and a solid assurance that they will receive much wider and deeper attention and study during the next half-century." In Spain, a land that never applied Rerum Novarum, the Roman Catholic Church last week accommodated itself to somewhat different necessities. Reports from Rome and Madrid indicated that the Vatican had finally agreed to let Franco recover Alfonso XIII's power to nominate Spain's bishops, subject to papal ratification.

Eighteen of the 70 Spanish sees fell vacant while this point was disputed (nine bishops were killed in anti-Catholic excesses during the civil war). Vacant is the primatial see of Toledo. Its late holder, Isidoro Cardinal Goma y Tomas, wholeheartedly supported Franco during the war, but later Franco suppressed his pastoral letter "Lessons of the War and Duties of the Peace."

When the Spanish monarchy was overthrown in 1931 Spain's was the only dynasty which still had the privilege of appointing prelates. None of the 16 new concordats which the Vatican has signed since 1918 grants a government this right. Franco claimed it.

To show his good intentions, as soon as he won he upheld the monarchy's end of the old concordat by paying the Catholic clergy of Spain salaries of $6,200,000 a year, which the republic had abolished, and restoring much confiscated church property, including $30,000,000 expropriated from the Jesuits. Now he will apparently receive quid for his quo.

*In 1892 Leo XIII restored Single-Taxer McGlynn to his priestly standing without his being obliged to retract a word of his utterances on economics.

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