The Troubled Origins of the Italian Catholic Labor Movement, 1878–1914

Sándor Agócs

• Publisher: Wayne State University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780814343319
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Denominations

In his book, Sándor Agócs explores the conflicts that accompanied the emergence of the Italian Catholic labor movement. He examines the ideologies that were at work and details the organizational forms they inspired. During the formative years of the Italian labor movement, Neo-Thomism became the official ideology of the church. Church leadership drew upon the central Thomistic principal of caritas, Christian love, in its response to the social climate in Italy, which had become increasingly charged with class consciousness and conflict. Aquinas's principles ruled out class struggle as contrary to the spirit of Christianity and called for a symbiotic relationship among the various social strata. Neo-Thomistic philosophy also emphasized the social functions of property, a principle that demanded the paternalistic care and tutelage of the interests of working people by the wealthy. In applying these principles to the nascent labor movement, the church's leadership called for a mixed union ( misto ), whose membership would include both capitalists and workers. They argued that this type of union best reflected the tenets of Neo-Thomistic social philosophy. In addition, through its insistence on the misto, the church was also motivated by an obsessive concern with socialism, which it viewed as a threat, and by a fear of the working classes, which it associated with socialism, which it viewed as a threat, and by a fear of the working classes, which it associated with socialism. In pressing for the mixed union, therefore, the church leadership hoped not only to realize Neo-Thomistic principles, but also to defuse class struggle and prevent the proletariat from becoming a viable social and political force. Catholic activists, who were called upon to put ideas into practice and confronted social realities daily, learned that the "mixed" unions were a utopian vision that could not be realized. They knew that the age of paternalism was over and that neither the workers not the capitalists were interested in the mixed union. In its stead, the activists urged for the "simple" union, an organization for workers only. The conflict which ensued pitted the bourgeoisie and the Catholic hierarchy against the young activists.Sándor Agócs reveals precisely in what way Catholic social thought was inadequate to deal with the realities of unionization and why Catholics were unable to present a reasonable alternative.

1

Philosophy by Decree:
Leo XIII and the Thomistic Revival

During the papacy of Leo XIII (1878–1903), Neo-Thomism was fast becoming an official philosophy of the church. This must have come as a surprise to some, since at first Leo did not emphasize Aquinas’s philosophy at the expense of other trends within the church’s theological traditions. Although Inscrutabili Dei consilio, his first encyclical, issued on April 21, 1878, did point to the importance of Thomistic philosophy, the Angelic Doctor was mentioned as a member of a cast, together with the “great Augustine” and the “other teachers of Christian wisdom.”¹ Even Aeterni Patris, Leo’s “Thomistic” encyclical, published on August 4, 1879, listed several others within a review of the historical evolution of Christian doctrine, again reserving a place of honor for Augustine. Nevertheless, in Aeterni Patris Leo presented Aquinas’s thought as the culmination in the development of theology and philosophy.²

Apparently Thomism was rapidly gaining an overwhelming importance in the new pope’s outlook, for even before the publication of Aeterni Patris there were dismissals at the Gregorian University, then known as Collegio Romano. On May 16, 1879, a cleric well connected with the papal university reported to his superior in France that “during the last few days five professors have been dismissed from the Collegio Romano, among others the Fathers Palmieri, Caretti, and Zampieri. The wish of the holy father is the wish of God. They will not be teaching when the school reopens because they were not Thomists enough—but that is between us.”

If there was a message here, by 1881 almost everyone in Rome seemed to have understood it. Thus a report written to the American bishop James Gibbons: “As Your Grace is aware, scholasticism’s star is now in the ascent throughout the Eternal City. The majority of professors not bred up as Thomists have been forced to vacate their chairs in favor of the Napolitan schools of philosophy and theology; whilst every tongue has learned to lisp the new slang phrase in Rome: Ut ait Sanctus Doctor.”

That Thomism was an official theology of the church seems to have become history by 1898, and Leo’s statement lends credence to this view:

In our encyclical Aeterni Patris, we have sufficiently demonstrated the road to follow in the study of the superior sciences. To avoid the precepts of the Angelic Doctor is contrary to our wishes and is full of peril besides.… Those who wish to be real philosophers, and the religious must want that more than anything else, are obliged to establish the principles and the basis of their doctrine in Saint Thomas Aquinas[’s teachings].³

However, the pope’s attempt to center Catholic theology on the thought of Aquinas was less than a success on a worldwide basis. Although Thomism may have been declared philosophia perennis in Rome, the influence of Aquinas seems to have decreased the further away one was from the Vatican. Thus in France and Belgium, for instance, Thomism remained but one of several orientations in Catholic theology.⁴ Even in Italy there was significant resistance to making Thomism filosofia per decreto. Telling a philosopher to follow in Aquinas’s footsteps, some pointed out, was like asking a painter to paint like Michelangelo or telling a poet to write like Dante. But those taking the pope’s side argued that what Leo XIII was doing was but pursuing a particular educational policy. At this point the arguments began to lean toward empty sophism, for although the papal instructions that followed the publication of Aeterni Patris did make Aquinas’s philosophy an obligatory subject of studies in Italian seminaries, historical evidence shows that this was more than just a move to create a uniform system of philosophical education for the clergy.

Thomistic philosophy became decisive in shaping the intellectual outlook of Italian priests. Their pastoral activities, in turn, were to give Thomistic ideas a degree of popularity among Catholic laymen.⁵ This development explains the continual references to Thomistic notions in turn-of-the-century Italian Catholic thought. While Catholic writers were directed to the philosophy of Aquinas by so important a doctrinal statement as a papal encyclical, their readers were prepared by their pastors to receive and understand notions that grew out of Thomism.

The success of Thomism did not come suddenly. Rather, several historical developments laid the foundations for the wide acceptance of Aquinas’s ideas at the turn of the nineteenth century. In fact, Leo did not initiate anything new but merely strengthened an already existing interest in Thomism in Catholic theology. This interest, especially marked in Italy, had grown significantly during the papacy of Leo’s predecessor, Pius IX (1846–78), when intellectual centers of Neo-Thomistic orientation appeared all over Catholic Europe. Among the most significant in Italy was the semiofficial church publication Civiltà Cattolica of Rome. Father Matteo Liberatore (1810–92), who with other Jesuits edited the publication, was to play an important role in the drafting of Aeterni Patris. Personnel from the Thomistic Academia di Filosofia established in Naples, the “Napolitan school” mentioned in the letter to Monsignor Gibbons, also played a role in carrying out the Thomistic initiatives of Pope Leo XIII, who earlier, as the cardinal bishop of Perugia, presided over yet another Thomistic intellectual center in that Italian town.⁶

These centers testify to the existence of Thomistic intellectual traditions that apparently gained enough power during the second half of the nineteenth century to become institutionalized in Rome, Naples, and Perugia. Moreover, the writings of Aquinas were an integral part of the intellectual heritage of the church for centuries. Catholic priests studied the Summa long before papal instructions made its reading obligatory. The printing office of the Seminary of Padua, for instance, published the collected works of Aquinas as early as 1698; and the biographers of Pius X tell how Giuseppe Sarto, a young seminarian in Padua during the middle of the nineteenth century, moved with awe through the halls of the “mystical and intellectual cathedral built by centuries of Catholic theology” as he absorbed the Summa and acquired, according to one of his instructors, an “extensive and rare knowledge of the facts of medieval history and their chronological order.”⁷

The attention Sarto’s instructors paid to medieval history and Aquinas was a sign of the special importance Thomism gained after the Revolution of 1789. During the Restoration Neo-Thomism became a refuge for the leaders of the church who rejected the Revolution and the intellectual and social changes it introduced. They counterposed the philosophy of Aquinas to the ideology of the Revolution.⁸ As the Italian historian Pietro Scoppola characterized it, Neo-Thomism became a veritable “Catholic counter-revolution.” Even sympathetic observers of Pope Leo’s Thomistic initiatives saw Neo-Thomism as a “philosophical apology of tradition.” The “return to the Middle Ages” involved in the adherence to Aquinas’s thought gave Catholic conservativism, as the French historian Jean-Marie Mayeur was to observe, not only a theological but also a social and political coherence.⁹ The vision of medieval society in the works of Aquinas came to be upheld as the corrective for the conditions of modern society. Aquinas’s ideas were pitted against the ideology of bourgeois liberalism, particularly Hegel’s, whose thought reflected the new social, political, and intellectual conditions created by the Revolution.

Italian Neo-Thomism found its identity in a struggle against Vincenzo Gioberti, the most important representative of Hegelianism in mid-nineteenth-century Italy. The marked political and social orientation of Giobertian philosophy imposed a similar emphasis upon contemporary Thomists. Thus the Leonine generation of Neo-Thomists carried on the earlier practice of applying Aquinas’s philosophy to the social and political problems of the day. Aeterni Patris was part of this trend: from considerations of pure philosophy, the encyclical moved on to social and political arguments in favor of a Thomistic revival.

More specifically, Aeterni Patris stated that the philosophy of Aquinas, because it admirably harmonized faith and reason, would prepare Catholics for the defense of their faith against those who opposed the dogmas of religion in the name of reason. For the pope, however, the importance of Thomistic philosophy obviously went beyond the defense of the principles of the Catholic religion, for he added that Thomism was also useful in combatting “perverse” modern political and social doctrines:

For, the teachings of Aquinas on the true meaning of liberty, which at this time is running into licence, on the divine origin of all authority, on laws and their force, on the paternal and just rule of princes, on obedience to the higher powers, on mutual charity one toward another—on all of these and kindred subjects—have very great and invincible force to overturn those principles of the new order which are well known to be dangerous to the peaceful order of things and to public safety.¹⁰

2

The Right to Property Sanctioned by Natural Law

The Defense of Private Property

Thomistic social philosophy was based upon the theological concept of caritas, Christian love. “The mistress and queen of virtues,” according to Leo XIII,¹ charity was for Aquinas man’s way of sharing God’s essence, His very nature, which is love. Charity was the bond that united man with God and with his fellow men. For Aquinas caritas was the bond that made society a unit; it was the lifeblood of the social body, an indispensable means to social solidarity.²

Thomistic theology distinguished between spiritual and material expressions of charity. Spiritual forms, such as making an erring brother aware of his sins, were considered more important than acts of material charity, such as giving alms. Despite this, Aquinas stressed the need for both forms of charity in virtuous Christian life. The giving of alms was thus essential, and those Catholics who systematically avoided helping the “poor” with alms were committing a grave sin.³

The notion of charity as an instrument of social solidarity was supported in Neo-Thomistic theology by the concept of the “social function of property,” which reaffirmed the traditional Christian principle of ownership as stewardship. This notion implied that the owners of wealth were “administrators” appointed by God to manage and dispense the bounty of earth, which was given by God to the whole of mankind. With property thus belonging in a sense to the community, all men were perceived to have the right to the basic necessities of life.⁴

Aquinas certainly would have been horrified at the sight of men hanged during the heyday of old-style liberalism because they stole a loaf of bread to save themselves from starvation. The English Cardinal Henry Edward Manning expressed the spirit of the Summa when he declared that “the natural right of every man to life and to the food necessary for the sustenance of life prevails overall positive laws,” and “a starving man has a right to his neighbor’s bread.” For Aquinas indeed made it clear that in dire need for physical survival, taking someone else’s property was not even stealing, but an exercise of “natural” rights.⁵

True as they may have been to the spirit of Saint Thomas, Manning’s remarks apparently did not receive a wide response from Italian Thomists, whose writings came to be characterized by numerous references to another “natural” right: that of holding property as a private possession. Cardinal Alfonso Capecelatro (1824–1912), a leading member of the Italian episcopate and a very popular writer, stated that Aquinas “demonstrated” that “private property derived from man’s very nature.” But an intense and rather emotional debate among Thomists later turned up evidence to suggest that the Angelic Doctor was far from being as unequivocal as Capecelatro suggested. If he accepted private property as a “natural” right at all, Aquinas apparently qualified his acceptance. Statements have even been found in the Summa that suggest an outright rejection of the principle of private property as a “natural” right. And if private property did not derive from nature, then it would have to be included in some Thomistic category other than “natural law.”⁶

We have here the explanation of the emotional intensity of the debate among Neo-Thomists, for in Aquinas’s philosophy, “natural” law and “natural” rights imply permanence and immutability, as handiworks of God. “Civic” laws that could have provided an alternative category for property were enacted by states. If we concede that civic laws are relevant to private property, then as J. B. McLaughlin, one of the debaters, was to state, “We are to be prepared to accept schemes of social reorganization which abolish private property.” And that would have been just as unacceptable to Italian Neo-Thomists as it was to McLaughlin, their conservative Irish counterpart. Since Aquinas said unequivocally that private property did not fall under the category of “natural law” and “civic” law was conceived of as representing a threat to private property, conservative Neo-Thomists took refuge in another category that Aquinas also connected with property. According to the Angelic Doctor, this category, jus gentium, was established by human reason, but was not formally promulgated as were civic laws. Since reason was “natural,” Neo-Thomists considered the particular jus gentium about property “natural” as well, which in turn led to the conclusion that private property could not be abolished without violating “nature.”⁷ As proof of the indispensability of private property, they usually referred to a passage in the Summa that argued that man should possess things as his own:

First because every man is more careful to procure what is for himself alone than that which is common to many or to all: since each one would shirk the labour and leave to another that which concerns the community, as happens where there is a great number of servants. Secondly, because human affairs are conducted in more orderly fashion if each man is charged with taking care of some particular thing himself, whereas there would be confusion if everyone had to look after any one thing indeterminately. Thirdly, because a more peaceful state is ensured to man if each one is contented with his own. Hence it is to be observed that quarrels arise more frequently where there is no division of the things possessed.⁸

The Italian Bishop Geremia Bonomelli (1831–1914), like Capecelatro a prolific and popular writer and a major figure in the Italian church hierarchy, followed a pattern adopted by Catholic sociological treatises by referring to this passage and interpreting it as well. He stated that “not only nature, but the interests of society” too “demanded” the private ownership of property, since it was an incentive for work and, as such, promot...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Philosophy by Decree: Leo XIII and the Thomistic Revival
• Chapter 2: The Right to Property Sanctioned by Natural Law
• Chapter 3: Inequality of Rights and Power Proceeds from the Very Author of Nature
• Chapter 4: Fraternity and Angelic Charity
• Chapter 5: The Spirit of Revolutionary Change
• Chapter 6: To Restore All Things in Christ
• Chapter 7: Aversion to the Higher Classes Is Contrary to the True Spirit of Christian Charity
• Chapter 8: He Who Is a Saint Cannot Disagree with the Pope
• Chapter 9: Religion, the Best Custodian of Justice
• Chapter 10: The Pope Will Remain Silent
• Conclusions
• Notes
• References
• Index