Catholic Social Activism

Progressive Movements in the United States

Sharon Erickson Nepstad

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781479853601
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Denominazioni cristiane

A history of Catholic social thought
Many Americans assume that the Catholic Church is inherently conservative, based on its stances on abortion, contraception, and divorce. Yet there is a longstanding tradition of progressive Catholic movements in the United States that have addressed a variety of issues from labor, war, immigration, and environmental protection, to human rights, women’s rights, exploitive development practices, and bellicose foreign policies. These Catholic social movements have helped to shift the Church from an institution that had historically supported incumbent governments and political elites to a Church that has increasingly sided with the vulnerable and oppressed.
This book provides a concise history of progressively oriented Catholic Social Thought, which conveys the Catholic Church’s position on a variety of social justice concerns. Sharon Erickson Nepstad introduces key papal encyclicals and other church documents, showing how lay Catholics in the United States have put these ideas into practice through a creative and sometimes provocative political engagement. Nepstad also explores how these progressive movements have pressured the religious hierarchy to respond to pressing social issues, such as women’s ordination, conscription, and the morality of nuclear deterrence policies.
Catholic Social Activism vividly depicts how these progressive movements have helped to shape the religious landscape of the United States, and how they have provoked controversy and debate among Catholics and non-Catholics alike.

1

Dignity and Just Treatment of Workers

Prior to the eighteenth century, most Europeans and North Americans lived in rural settings. Many were small farmers, producing food for their own families and selling or trading whatever surplus they were able to generate. Others were craftsmen and craftswomen, using basic tools and simple machinery to produce goods within their homes. These were typically family businesses, with parents and children working together for their survival. The average citizen did not have much; incomes were so meager that most could hope for little more than providing basic food and shelter for their families. Malnourishment and illness were common.1

With the introduction of the steam engine and mass production, factory owners recruited the peasantry to leave behind their agrarian existence to find employment in urban centers. Factories were expanding quickly, and men, women, and children were hired to provide labor for the burgeoning industrial economy. Proponents of industrialization proclaimed that mechanization and mass production would transform the economy and everyday life, providing a wide variety of manufactured goods. Life during the Industrial Revolution was, indeed, transformed. But for many, it did not bring improvements. For the typical factory worker, daily existence was brutal. Most worked between ten and fourteen hours a day, six days a week. Moreover, the work was tedious. Skilled artisans, who had taken pride in their craftsmanship, found themselves performing the same monotonous task, over and over, on the assembly line. Former peasants missed the variety of jobs involved in running a family farm and the independence of setting one’s own schedule. The pay was also substandard. Men earned poverty-level wages; women and children were paid even less. With parents and children spending sixty to seventy hours a week in factories, family life was utterly destroyed.2 Additionally, conditions within factories were deplorable, with industrial accidents occurring frequently, including mine explosions, factory fires, and equipment injuries. Tens of thousands were killed from these accidents, hundreds of thousands more were injured and maimed, yet employers seldom provided compensation for workplace deaths or injuries.3

These dangerous and exploitive conditions prompted some Catholic leaders to speak out. They argued that the church must support laborers or else risk losing them to other movements of that era. This chapter examines some of the historical trends, events, individuals, and experiences that pushed Pope Leo XIII to release Rerum Novarum in 1891. It further provides an overview of the second papal encyclical, Quadragesimo Anno (known as “The Reconstruction of the Social Order”), released in 1931 by Pope Pius XI. I conclude the chapter by exploring how these teachings on labor were interpreted and put into practice by the Catholic Worker movement and the United Farm Workers movement.

Historical Context Leading Up to Rerum Novarum

The Communist Manifesto and the Emergence of Marxism

As industrialization expanded, so too did the suffering of factory workers. But this suffering was not passively accepted. By the mid-nineteenth century, workers were forming unions and proposing various solutions to their plight. In 1847, a group of radicals commissioned Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels to write a manifesto that would explain the roots of workers’ misery, propose a solution to this exploitive dynamic, and offer a call to arms.

According to Marx and Engels, the source of industrial workers’ misery is found in the inherently conflicted relationship between the bourgeoisie, who own all the means of producing goods (such as factories and industrial machinery), and the proletariat, who do not own the means of production and therefore can only earn a living by selling their labor in exchange for wages. On the one hand, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat have an interdependent relationship: factory owners need workers to run the equipment and staff the assembly line, while workers need the factory owners to supply them with jobs. On the other hand, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat do not have equal influence. Since they own the business and equipment, the bourgeoisie have the upper hand—especially because there were virtually no labor laws at the time to protect workers’ rights.

This unequal power relationship meant that the bourgeoisie had the capacity to hire or fire workers, to set their wages, and determine their work tasks and hours. This often resulted in various forms alienation. Specifically, Marx described how industrial workers—who once were their own bosses on the family farm, where they undertook a wide variety of tasks on their own time frame—were now subjected to the efficiency-focused assembly line. The production process was broken into discrete acts that could be performed as quickly as possible with little training. To use a contemporary illustration, someone working for an automobile factory would not make an entire car but would be assigned to one task—such as screwing in a bolt or attaching a single piece of electrical wiring—which leads to alienation from the act of working. Work should be pleasurable, but the monotonous, repetitive nature of the assembly-line made work drudgery. The proletariat is also alienated from the product of one’s labor. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, farmers and craftsmen created various goods through their own full efforts. They made shoes or furniture and felt a sense of pride in their final product, which reflected their skill. In contrast, in assembly-line production, factory workers do not see the finished product and thus do not feel the same attachment to the product. This is further linked to alienation from workers’ own potential. Working long hours in a factory doing mind-numbing work, members of the proletariat have no time or energy to develop their skills, talents, and intellectual abilities. Finally, members of the proletariat are alienated from their fellow workers. Since the bourgeoisie want to keep labor costs down, they will, according to Marx, promote division and competition among workers. They can do this by actively encouraging the development of a large population of poor people so that they have a ready supply of workers from their “surplus army of labor.” When this occurs, workers may be less willing to organize and rebel, since they know they can easily be replaced. The bourgeoisie may also encourage divisions along racial, ethnic, gender, or religious lines. This keeps workers focused on their differences rather than uniting and organizing together due to their common experiences of oppression.

In addition to these various forms of alienation, Marx described several ways in which the bourgeoisie can exploit their workers. First, the bourgeoisie, who are motivated to maximize profits, routinely required their workers to put in long hours. This, combined with child labor practices, meant the destruction of family life for factory employees. Parents and children alike left home in the early morning hours and returned late at night, with no time or energy to devote to one another. Second, workers were dehumanized, seen as little more than tools in the production process or appendages of the machinery. And, if a tool breaks, no one mourns; they simply replace it with another tool. So, too, is the injured worker tossed out without a second thought, without concern about how this will affect the well-being of his or her family. Third, the bourgeoisie can steal the surplus value created by workers. In other words, they can force workers to produce more goods in the same amount of time without increasing their pay; the extra product generated can be sold without the cost of labor, thereby increasing the profit. As an illustration, imagine that a textile factory worker is paid $10.00 an hour and is required to sew four shirts in that time frame, making the cost of labor for each shirt $2.50. Then one day, the factory owner announces that the hourly wage will remain the same, but now each worker must sew five shirts in an hour. The labor cost per shirt is subsequently $2.00, enabling the bourgeoisie to collect more profit since the labor costs are lower. Instead of compensating workers for the value created by their labor, the bourgeoisie steal the compensation that workers are rightfully owed.

The fourth form of exploitation occurs when the bourgeoisie promote false consciousness. This term refers to the intentional promotion of ideas that will keep the proletariat from rebelling. The primary manifestation of false consciousness is religion, according to Marx and Engels. In their view, religion is a set of ideas that teaches the poor and the oppressed that their lot in life is part of God’s will. They will suffer in this life, but if they are faithful and submit to God’s divine plan, they will be rewarded in the afterlife with eternal salvation. In contrast, if the proletariat rebel, this is tantamount to rebelling against God—which results in eternal damnation. Hence religion acts as a drug that temporarily eases the pain of workers’ suffering, allowing workers to believe that their acceptance of this difficult life will eventually yield a great reward. As Marx put it, “Man makes religion, religion does not make man. . . . Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.”4

So what was Marx’s solution to this situation of exploitation? Marx maintained that workers had to abolish religion so that they could see the true nature of their oppressive situation. If they eliminated religion, the proletariat would no longer believe that their suffering was a divine mandate; they would see that it was a result of the exploitive system set up by the bourgeoisie to increase their own wealth and power. As this false consciousness disappears, a new class consciousness will develop. With this new consciousness, workers will recognize this human-made system can be changed but only through the organized and united efforts of the proletariat, who would rise up to violently overthrow the system, eliminating the bourgeoisie’s control of the “means of production.” Once the bourgeoisie were ousted, business would be regulated by the state to eliminate any exploitive dynamics. In other words, the revolutionary movement of the workers would result in socialism. Over time, as class consciousness deepened and workers recognized the importance of just relations and work that promotes human dignity for all, the state would no longer be needed to regulate industry and business; the state would simply wither away, leaving a classless form of society known as communism.

European Catholic Responses: Archbishop Ketteler and the Fribourg Union

Marx’s analysis resonated with industrial workers throughout central Europe. It also caught the attention of some European Catholic leaders, who shared Marx’s concerns about the exploitation and impoverishment of workers, but who could not accept his views on religion. These leaders called upon the Catholic Church to respond to these injustices; otherwise, the church risked becoming socially obsolete.

One of the most notable responses came from Wilhelm Emmanuel von Ketteler, archbishop of Mainz, Germany. By 1869, Archbishop Ketteler formally proposed solutions to the dilemmas of industrial capitalism, which he asked the assembly of German bishops to endorse. His solutions included paying a sustainable wage, abolishing child labor, establishing limitations on the length of the workday, proposing Sundays off, closing unhealthy or unsafe work spaces, separating men and women in the factories, and providing care for injured workers.

A series of violent events that erupted in the 1870s brought a new urgency to Archbishop Ketteler’s proposals. Europe’s sense of stability was rattled by the onset of the Franco-Prussian War and the Commune de Paris, a worker uprising. These events generated new interest in socialism among the working class. To counter this trend, clergy and laity decided to organize worker clubs within the church that would bring together the proletariat and the upper class for social events, prayer, and discussion of such political and economic questions. One of the first was the Parisian Society of Catholic Worker Circles (L’Oeuvre des Cercles Catholiques d’Ourvriers), which was formed in 1870. Within a few short years, there were several hundred clubs in France, with a total of 50,000 members. Catholic youth organizations, serving as feeder organizations for the worker circles, also flourished during this period. By the 1880s, the youth clubs had roughly 140,000 members.5 Over time, these “circles” became an important place for Catholics to study and discuss pressing social issues.

Similar study groups were forming in Austria, Switzerland, and Italy. One of these groups was known as the Fribourg Union, which formed in October 1884 when four laypeople asked to meet with the bishop of Lausanne, Gaspard Mermillod, at his home in Fribourg, Switzerland. The group later expanded to include several dozen theologians and laypeople, who continued to meet annually, from 1885 to 1891, to discuss a Catholic response to capitalism and socialism.

From these meetings, five central themes emerged. The first theme is that charity is an insufficient solution. Bishop Mermillod emphasized that charity provided only temporary relief and that the problem of poverty could only be addressed through the establishment of social justice. The second theme dealt with the issue of just wages. The Fribourg Union argued that work must be viewed not merely as a commodity but as a personal act of value. Hence a just wage rewards the value of human labor, and it also must be sufficient to maintain a family living in modest conditions. The third theme deals with the role of the state. The Fribourg Union held that the state does not need to be involved in work environments unless workers are being oppressed. In these circumstances, the state must intervene to stop abuses and ensure the basic livelihood of workers. The fourth theme focuses on the issue of private property. The Fribourg Union sought a middle ground between capitalists, who believed in the inalienable right to private property, and socialists, who opposed it. The Fribourg Union participants argued that people did have the right to private property, but that it was a limited right that could not interfere with humans’ right to subsist.

The fifth and final theme emphasizes a corporately organized society. This refers to a vision of the economy not organized according to one’s relationship to the means of production but based on people’s common social functions. Hence craft workers would form a natural set of ties and relationships, which could be seen as a corporation that looked after common interests of its members. This corporative approach was also applied to factories, where workers and factory owners were encouraged to see one another as a professional family, since they work collectively to produce goods. This “professional family” would then meet with similar groups in the same area to form a regional council, composed of both the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. The regional council would establish rules to govern their work spaces and would also form an endowment to provide loans, retirement benefits, and i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1. Dignity and Just Treatment of Workers
• 2. Peace, Nonviolence, and Disarmament
• 3. Equality for Women and Catholic Feminism
• 4. Liberation Theology and the Central America Solidarity Movement
• 5. Compassion for Immigrants and the Sanctuary Movements
• 6. Earth Ethics and American Catholic Environmentalism
• Conclusion: Contributions of Progressive US Catholic Movements
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• References
• Index
• About the Author