Social Catholicism in Europe/That They Be One
Coleman, John A.
CATHOLIC SOCIAL TEACHING-I SOCIAL CATHOLICISM IN EUROPE From the Onset of Industrialization to the First World War Paul Misner Crossroad, $29.95, 362 pp. THAT THEY BE ONE The Social Teachings...
...Yet there are essential motifs: a coherent world view that links God to history and creation, supports claims to an objective grounding of morality against subjectivism and relativism, and insists that selves are embedded in communities...
...Had the anniversary of Rerum novarum produced only Misner's book, it would have been ample enough—but Michael Schuck's book is a wonderful complement to Misner's...
...He shows that John Paul II's claim that the church has always taught the priority of labor over capital will not stand up to historical scrutiny...
...and at one in opposing atheism, secularization, the privatization of religion, and the claims of an amoral economics...
...Schuck surveys every encyclical ever written to see if he can piece together a coherent social stance...
...it came right before the rise of economic activity that would for the first time permit a modest rise in the standard of living of the ordinary worker in industrialized societies...
...The lesson in all of this is that it will not do to read the Commonweal 31 January 1992: 37 texts of social Catholicism without some careful critique of its background ideologies...
...He divides the corpus into pre-Leonine, Leonine (from Leo XIII through John XXIII), and post-Leonine periods...
...Still he also finds a kind of coherence in the tradition, a coherence not just of texts but of argument...
...Misner has written a gem of a book and whetted my appetite for volume 2 which will take us up to 1960 and the days immediately preceding Vatican II...
...Paul Misner, professor of theology at Marquette University, has written a magisterial history, covering the period from 1840 to 1920, of the Catholic social movements in Belgium, France, Italy, Germany, and Austria...
...Misner supports this thesis in close detail for the proper reading of Rerum novarum...
...And there am other details and themes that help the modem reader to understand the strengths and weaknesses of the Catholic social tradition...
...John A. Coleman The centenary year of Rerum novarum has just ended—a year that should have produced some ground-breaking scholarly work on Catholic social thought...
...What emerges from this thorough treatment (unsurpassed in any language) is the close articulation between Catholic social thought and parallel secular movements as well as with the phases of European industrialization...
...There is also attention given to groups, to the stances of the Angers school, the Catholic Congresses of Liege, the Patrons du Nord (Catholic factory owners in France), the influential Union de Fribourg that did the required reflection and thinking that preceded Rerum novarum, and the social Catholic think tank in MunchenGladbach...
...Schuck's volume will be indispensable for those interested in the theological grounding and coherence of Catholic social teaching...
...Moreover, a great many encyclicals (for example, Pius XI's Divini redemptoris on atheistic communism or Paul VI's Humanae vitae) treat, in more than incidental ways, social issues related to the family, censorship, the mass media, etc...
...In a very original fashion, Schuck provides for the three periods ideal-types of theologies of God (the Shepherd, the Creator who sustains the order of the world, and the fellow pilgrim through history), of the attitude toward the world, the understanding of the church, and the sources of objective morality...
...THAT THEY BE ONE The Social Teachings of the Papal Encyclicals 1740-1989 Michael J. Schuck Georgetown University, $14.95, 224 pp...
...Although varyingly grounded, the encyclical tradition is at one in affirming an objective basis for morality (in tradition, in natural law, or in moral value) and a communitarian definition of the self...
...To the old canard that Rerum novarum came too late, Misner responds: "In this chronological setting [later industrialization on the continent than in Great Britain], Rerum novarum did not come too late...
...He buries earlier claims that the key to understanding Catholic social thought lies in natural law (see, Roger Charles, The Social Teaching of Vatican II, Ignatius), or in master concepts of human dignity (see, David Hollenbach, Claims in Conflict, Paulist...
...Papal social encyclicals, despite appearances, especially their stilted, near ahistorical language, did not descend from Vatican heights and papal insights...
...He documents contradictions and reversals of earlier teaching within the corpus of Catholic social teaching...
...Francis played in the lives of so many of the earliest social Catholics...
...Few have paid attention to the strange admixture of anti-Semitism and social Catholicism in Austria, and, later, as a part of integralism in France—a combination that seems a precursor to the same amalgam in America's Father Charles Coughlin during the New Deal...
...Contemporary Catholics, tryingto link spirituality to social justice, may be instructed by the important place membership in the Third Order of St...
...Nor is Schuck taken in by the rhetorical, "as the church has always taught...
...Misner carefully portrays the range of positions taken by social Catholics from socialists such as Philippe Buchez, to meliorists like the recently beatified Adolph Kolping, to reactionary corporatists like Vogelsang...
...As texts they cannot be understood and interpreted without close attention to the vigorous debates that took place in Catholic unions, mutual aid societies, Christian Democratic parties, and at the yearly semaines sociales in France and the Katholikentagen in Germany...
...Who knows that Pius X (the least socially enlightened of this century's popes) was on the very point of issuing an anti-trade union Syllabus as part of his antimodernist campaign...
...The roster of names—Romolo Murri, Franz von Baader, Frederick Ozanam, Armand de Melun, Leon Harmel, Donoso Cortes, Rene de la Tour du Pin, Franz Hitze, Karl von Vogelsang, Wilhelm von Ketteler, Mateo Liberatore (the primary author of Rerum novarum)—is a veritable roll-call of European social Catholicism...
...He lays to rest several misconceptions...
...Against those who claim that the social thought in encyclicals has become more theological since Vatican II, he responds: the earlier periods are "no less theological...
...Schuck argues that "a single world view may be the basis for a variety of theories...
...Each encyclical period displays a particular but varying slant on Catholic communitarian social ethics...
...38: 31 January 1992 Commonweal...
...Michael Schuck, professor of theology at Loyola University, Chicago, calls attention to the arbitrariness in dating Catholic social teaching from Rerum novarum and 1891...
...their theologies are simply different...
...Popes, after all, have been writing encyclicals on social questions since 1740...
...Social Catholicism was at perpetual loggerheads with the thinking of the Manchester school of economics so the only real nineteenth-century "liberal" in this roster is Charles Perin of Louvain...
...Looking for something beyond the merely celebratory or produced for the anniversary, I am happy to have found these two books...
Vol. 119 • January 1992 • No. 2
