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The Reception of Leo XIII's Labor Encyclical in America, 1891–1919

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

Aaron I. Abell
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Extract

In America, as elsewhere, Catholic effort to reform the modern economic order antedates by some years Rerum Novarum, Leo XIII's masterly encyclical on the condition of labor, issued in May, 1891. For a full generation Catholics in France and Germany had been organizing to ameliorate social conditions, and in all industrialized lands the more progressive members of the Church insisted that a sincere attempt to apply Christianity to the social order must be made without delay. The reformers, nevertheless, needed aid and encouragement from the Pope, preferably a reasoned analysis of the industrial situation showing the desirability and means of bettering labor's condition. Everywhere, the few Catholics who championed labor's cause in the Church's name met unyielding resistance from highly placed Catholics intent on protecting vested interests or sincere in thinking that social reform meant social convulsion. As for American Catholics, if their leaders, ecclesiastics for the most part, had not, in many instances or to a conspicuous degree, deferred to great wealth, as a group they had seen in the struggling labor movement little more than a revolutionary uprising, a projection on these shores of the Socialist and Anarchist movements of the Old World.

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Articles
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 7 , Issue 4 , October 1945 , pp. 464 - 495
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 1945

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page 495 note * An appreciation of the life of Monsignor Ryan who died since the preparation of this article will appear in the January, 1946, issue of the Review.—The Editors.