Catholic Labor Movements in Europe

* Book: Catholic Labor Movements in Europe. Social Thought and Action, 1914–1965. Paul Misner.

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"an in-depth journey through social Catholicism: Misner is perhaps at his best when analyzing social thinkers who sought a “third way”—a distinctly Christian alternative to liberal capitalism or Marxism. Men like Heinrich Resch, SJ, Othmar Spann, and Romano Guardini."

Review

Steven Englund:

"This is the second and final volume of a project Misner began long ago: to provide an account of “the classical age of social Catholicism,” the span of history, from 1820 to the 1950s, that the philosopher Charles Taylor has called the “age of [Christian] Mobilization.” Despite its title, the present book goes well beyond social and labor movements in the church to deal with papal and episcopal action vis-à-vis the great powers and ideologies between 1914 and 1965. Misner compacts a vast amount of history on his way to recounting the emergence of “a Christian secular conception of the world” (Maritain) and the corresponding adaptation of social institutions within that conception. All the familiar names are here (and some unfamiliar ones too)—Sangnier, Cardijn, Mercier, Pauwels, Kunschak, Nell-Breuning, Chenu, Gasperi, Suenens—along with the usual alphabet soup of organizations from the ACJF to the JEC and the JOC, from Dom Sturzo’s PPI to SIPDIC, CWI, CGD, GeC and CFTC, and of course Cardinal Suhard’s controversial MF—the Mission de France, or “worker priest” movement, which Misner deems a “new and bold approach to the problem of de-christianized swaths of the population.”

(https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/catholic-labor-movements-europe)

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• "a fitting sequel to his fine first volume, Social Catholicism in Europe: From the Onset of Industrialization to the First World War (1991)."