The Reception of Leo XIII's Labor Encyclical in America, 1891–1919

1945 ◽  
Vol 7 (4) ◽  
pp. 464-495 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aaron I. Abell

In America, as elsewhere, Catholic effort to reform the modern economic order antedates by some years Rerum Novarum, Leo XIII's masterly encyclical on the condition of labor, issued in May, 1891. For a full generation Catholics in France and Germany had been organizing to ameliorate social conditions, and in all industrialized lands the more progressive members of the Church insisted that a sincere attempt to apply Christianity to the social order must be made without delay. The reformers, nevertheless, needed aid and encouragement from the Pope, preferably a reasoned analysis of the industrial situation showing the desirability and means of bettering labor's condition. Everywhere, the few Catholics who championed labor's cause in the Church's name met unyielding resistance from highly placed Catholics intent on protecting vested interests or sincere in thinking that social reform meant social convulsion. As for American Catholics, if their leaders, ecclesiastics for the most part, had not, in many instances or to a conspicuous degree, deferred to great wealth, as a group they had seen in the struggling labor movement little more than a revolutionary uprising, a projection on these shores of the Socialist and Anarchist movements of the Old World.

1938 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 138-155 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. Howard Hopkins

The Brotherhood of the Kingdom was organized in December, 1892, by a small group of converts to the ideal of the kingdom of God on earth who, not unmindful of the examples of St. Francis and of the Society of Jesus, planned to reestablish the idea of the kingdom “in the thought of the church and to assist in its practical realization in the world.” The year 1892 had witnessed a rising crescendo of social turbulence and political unrest throughout America. In the midwest the populist revolt was growing, while industrial warfare had broken out in the violent Homestead strike at the Carnegie steel plants. Jacob Riis had opened wide the festering tenements of the great cities in his revelation of How the Other Half Lives, while in intellectual circles the younger economists were rebelling against the tenets of the Manchester school. William Jennings Bryan's campaign for free silver was only four years away, and the Spanish–American War but six years in the future. Into such an atmosphere of storm and stress was born the Brotherhood of the Kingdom, dedicated to the realization of a spiritual ideal in the social order.


2019 ◽  
pp. 107-122
Author(s):  
Ana Sentov

This paper will examine how Grace Marks, the female protagonist/narrator of Alias Grace (1996), reclaims her history, which is comprised of many different, often contradictory stories of her life and the crime for which she is imprisoned. These stories reflect the dominant discourse of a conservative male-dominated society, in which Grace is an outsider, due to her gender, class, age, and immigrant status. The law, the medical profession, the church, and the media all see Grace as a disruptive element: a woman who committed or assisted in a murder, a lunatic and/or a member of the working class who dared disturb the social order. Grace is revealed not as a passive victim, an object to be acted upon, but as an agent capable of reclaiming history and constructing herstory, challenging and defying the expectations of dominant social structures. The paper will show that Alias Grace, as a novel giving voice to the marginalized and the silenced, stands as a compelling work that examines and provides insights into the position of women and its changes over the course of history, provoking a discourse that remains relevant today


2018 ◽  
Vol 62 (3) ◽  
pp. 191-208
Author(s):  
Małgorzata Kubacka

The aim of this article is to show the home as an emotional place. The sphere of social conditions, which has been neglected until recently, can help explain emotion as a social construct. Many researchers have pointed to the emotional dimension of the experience of the home and living practices. A home is a complex place, a conglomerate of three aspects: material, symbolic, and relational. The experience of domesticity can be considered to have multiple aspects and to be variable. Taking emotions into account enables a fuller understanding of the duality of household practices, in connection with both their “function” and their role in creating, recreating, and changing the rules of the social order. In this sense, a home is located between the private and public sphere, emotional authenticity and emotional work, freedom and control, socialization and de-socialization, everyday life and celebration.


Author(s):  
Sharon Erickson Nepstad

This chapter examines some of the historical trends, events, individuals, and experiences that pushed Pope Leo XIII in 1891 to release Rerum Novarum, the first papal encyclical. It also summarizes the main themes of this encyclical, whose title is translated as “The Condition of Labor.” It further provides an overview of the second papal encyclical, Quadragesimo Anno (“After Forty Years,” also known as “The Reconstruction of the Social Order”), released in 1931 by Pope Pius XI. The chapter concludes with an exploration of how these teachings on labor were interpreted and put into practice by the Catholic Worker movement, led by Dorothy Day, and the United Farm Workers movement, led by César Chávez and Dolores Huerta.


2001 ◽  
Vol 25 (3) ◽  
pp. 543-564
Author(s):  
Kester Aspden

It is ironic that it should have been the leader of the church with the greatest proportion of working-class members who took up the most hostile stance to the General Strike of 1926. While Francis Bourne (1862–1935), Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster, won the plaudits of the Establishment for his unambiguous denunciation of the strike, that cautious septuagenarian Randall Davidson, Archbishop of Canterbury, found himself cast in the unlikely role of the workers’ friend after his illstarred attempt to conciliate the two sides. Sheridan Gilley has highlighted another contrast: while in 1926 Bourne found himself sharply opposed to labour, in a 1918 pastoral letter he had been insistent that the Church should reach an accommodation with the ‘modern labour unrest’. While Gilley implies that his General Strike condemnation was uncharacteristic, Buchanan suggests that this was closer to expressing his ‘real political views’ than his 1918 statement. This article aims to provide a closer examination of the shift in Bourne’s attitude, and to consider the broader episcopal response to social and political questions during these fraught years.


1934 ◽  
Vol 3 (4) ◽  
pp. 285-299
Author(s):  
Cyril K. Gloyn

The era of the English Reform Bill of 1832 presented difficulties and dangers to both state and church. For the state it set the task of achieving a social order—of forming a new social mind—in a period when social change had destroyed the basis of custom in English life and thought. The rise and growth of mechanized industry had produced both a new working class separated from the land and the processes of production and with only its labor to sell in return for a meager livelihood, and a new industrial middle class which, finding itself excluded from the rights and privileges of the state, had set about the task of acquiring a political position comparable to its new economic status. Though the latter group secured the passage of the Reform Bill, to secure social stability was a much more difficult task. The industrial society showed itself as a divided society, described by Disraeli as “two nations between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy … as if they were dwellers in different zones, or inhabitants of different planets,” a society in whose towns a French writer of the period could discover “nothing but masters and operatives.”


1987 ◽  
Vol 38 (2) ◽  
pp. 210-235 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ellen S. More

In 1644 the Puritan lawyer and parliamentary pamphleteer, William Prynne, voiced a question much on the minds of moderate Puritans: Would not Congregationalism ‘by inevitable necessary consequence subvert…all settled…forms of civil government…and make every small congregation, family (yea person if possible), an independent church and republic exempt from all other public laws’? What made Congregationalism seem so threatening? The calling of the Long Parliament encouraged an efflorescence of Congregational churches throughout England. While differing in many other respects, their members were united in the belief that the true Church consisted of individually gathered, self-governing congregations of the godly. Such a Church was answerable to no other earthly authority. The roots of English Congregationalism extended back to Elizabethan times and beyond. Some Congregationalists, in the tradition of Robert Browne, believed in total separation from the Established Church; others, following the later ideas of Henry Jacob, subscribed to semi-separatism, believing that a godly remnant remained within the Established Church. For semi-separatists some contact with the latter was permissible, as was a loose confederation of gathered churches. During the English civil wars and Interregnum, the Church polity of most leading religious Independents actually was semi-separatist.


Author(s):  
Nadina Milewska-Pindor

This article presents a short history of the origin and creation of the Almanac “Women and Russia,” which began as a samizdat underground publication devoted to the problem of women and childrearing in the USSR. The idea for creating such an Almanac originated in the mid 1970s in the Leningrad circle of ‘unofficial culture’, at the initiative of the artist Tatyana Mamonova, religious philosopher Tatyana Goricheva, and the women author Natasha Malachovska. The women writers featured in the first edition of the Almanac addressed not only questions about the social conditions prevailing in the USSR, but above all exposed the consequences for women living and functioning ina patriarchal social order, and ironically one where all the questions concerning ‘women’s rights’ were deemed to have been resolved in a progressive fashion much earlier. Not only is the substance of the Almanac important, but the circumstances surrounding its publication and the subsequent consequences related to its publishing also reveal the state of the ‘women’s movement’ in the USSR of that time. These include the reactions of the representatives of the dissident culture, the interventions of the security apparatus and the attendant repression of the women activists and its effect on their lives, and the support of feminist organizations from abroad. Each of the afore-mentioned reactions and consequences became an element of and shaped the everyday lives of the activists involved in the creation of the Almanac. The events related in this work confirm the opinion of those researchers who consider that the publication of the Almanac marked the beginning of the resurrection of the feminist movement in Russia.


1964 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-19
Author(s):  
John Rickards Belts

In the late 1880's new sounds reverberated throughout the Catholic Church in America. Rapid urban growth and the rising tides of immigration required new perspectives on religion in the social order: science and historical criticism involved philosophy and theology, and rumblings of internal as well as external controversy were heard in the Church. The layman was achieving status in business and politics and, as he became more vocal on civic and cultural issues, he played a larger role in representing Catholicism before the American people. Self-critical voices sounded forth in the Catholic press, and churchmen were calling upon the laity. When the conjunction of several major centennial celebrations occurred in 1889, laymen leaped into the breach and started a trend in Catholic thought and action that has much to say to our generation, especially in the light of the Second Vatican Council.


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