PREPARED AND EDITED FOR THE DEPARTMENT OF SOCIAL ACTION OF THE BY JOHN A. RYAN, D.D., LL.D. Professor of Moral Theology at the Catholic University of America AND JOSEPH HUSSLEIN, S.J., Ph.D. Associate Editor of "America," Lecturer on Industrial History Author of "The World Problem," "Democratic Industry," etc., etc. New York THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 1920 All rights reserved こ ANDOVER-HARVARD THEOLOGICAL LIBRARY A69,969 Nihil Obatat. ARTHURUS J. SCANLAN, S.T.D., Censor Librorum. Imprimatur. PATRITIUS J. HAYES, D.D., Archiepiscopus Neo-Eboraci. COPYRIGHT, 1920, BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY Set up and electrotyped. Published, October, 1920 HD 6338 INTRODUCTION BY REV. JOHN A. RYAN, D.D. THIS volume is the first of a series which will endeavor to present adequately and authoritatively the Catholic doctrine on industrial, social and political institutions and relations. The attitude of the Church toward the individual and the salvation of the individual soul is fairly well understood, not only by Catholics but by intelligent non-Catholics. What is not so generally realized is the fact that the Church has a comprehensive and definite attitude toward group life, and all the great forms and manifestations of group organization. At no time in her history has the Church overlooked or ignored the fundamental moral fact that individuals live and act in society, as members of social groups, and involved in a great variety of social relations; therefore, that the individual's conduct is in a large measure social. As a member of the existing industrial organization, the individual enters into one set of relations and performs one set of actions; as a member of civil society, he enters another set of relations and performs another set of actions; as a member of society in general, the great society, or the unspecified society, he has other relations and follows another line of conduct. Precisely because the supreme object of the Church is to teach and help the individual to save his soul, she interests herself in social relations and the various forms of social organization. She maintains that the individual saves his soul not by faith alone but by works as well, by conduct, by obedience to the moral law. And she teaches that the moral law applies to every one of man's actions, those which bring him into relation with his neighbor, as well as those which affect only himself; those which arise out of his place in industry and in the State, as well as those which he performs as son, husband, or father. Therefore the Church has a formal and definite teaching concerning the great social organizations which affect and determine individual conduct. She has a definite teaching concerning the relations into which men enter as members of these societies. In the present volume her attitude and teaching are set forth in relation to one form of society, the industrial. The presentation does not, however, take in all the religious and moral aspects of industrial society. The book is entitled, "The Church and Labor," not, "The Church and Industry," nor "The Church and Capital," nor, "The Church and Agricultural Society." On each of these subjects a volume might be published, and in each case it would have a different scope from that of the one now offered to the public. Nevertheless, the labor problem is so intimately connected with the other problems and aspects of industrial society that the latter receive herein considerable attention and discussion. The book is essentially a collection of documents, issued by Popes, cardinals, bishops, and lesser authorities, but it is more than a simple collection. It presents, indeed, all the authoritative Catholic doctrine on the subject that it covers, but it also enables the reader to trace the continuity of the doctrine and its essential unity. To the student of industrial thought this is almost as important as the advantage of having all the important productions assembled between the covers of a single volume. One of the first reflections likely to occur to the discriminating reader is that the earliest production contained in the volume was written considerably less than a century ago. Neverthe less it would be wrong to draw therefrom the inference that Frederic Ozanam was the first prominent Catholic to discuss the labor question. In the thirteenth century,- to go no further back-St. Thomas Aquinas dealt with the ethics of wages; the great writers on justice in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, for example, Lugo and Lessius, treated the same subject with considerable particularity. The series of documents begins with the works of Ozanam and Ketteler because these were the first important Catholic authors who dealt with the labor question in its modern form. When we think of labor, the condition of labor, or the laboring class today, we have in mind the present industrial system. We are concerned with the arrangement in which commodities are produced by wage earners under the direction and in the pay of another industrial class called variously employers, capitalists, entrepreneurs. It is the system known as capitalism. Inasmuch as this system originated less than a century and a half ago, it is not surprising that the first important discussions of its moral and religious aspects appeared only in the first half of the nineteenth century. A still more significant fact, but one which probably will not occur to the majority of readers, is that the doctrines of Ozanam and Ketteler on social and industrial questions were at once original and traditional. They were original in the sense that they had not been enunciated by any previous Catholic authority. Ozanam and Ketteler had before them no papal encyclical as a guide and inspiration. The moral judgments that they uttered on contemporary industrial practices and on current proposals of reform, many of the moral principles that they enunciated for the abolition of industrial evils, and most of the economic proposals of betterment that they de fended, had never been expressed by a Pope, nor indeed by any important Catholic. On the other hand, their teaching contains no innovation and is in complete harmony with the traditional doctrines of the Fathers and the theologians. From their own explicit assurances we should know this to be the case, even if we were unacquainted with the ancient doctrines. Bishop Ketteler insisted again and again that he was teaching nothing essentially new, that he was proposing no principle that he had not derived from the patristic and medieval authorities. A comparison of his account and conception of the traditional principles with the discussion of the same principles in Cardinal Bourne's pastoral, will show that the two historical interpretations are in complete agreement. A striking confirmation of the dependence of Ozanam upon tradition is seen in the circumstance that his utterances on social and labor questions oc |