Radical Sufficiency

Work, Livelihood, and a U.S. Catholic Economic Ethic

Christine Firer Hinze

• Publisher: Georgetown University Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781647120276
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Teología cristiana

In this timely book, Christine Firer Hinze looks back at Monsignor John A. Ryan's American Catholic defense of worker justice and a living wage, advancing his efforts for an action-oriented livelihood agenda that situates US working families' economic pursuits within a comprehensive commitment to sustainable, "radical sufficiency" for all.

CHAPTER 1

John A. Ryan’s US Catholic Case for Worker Justice

In what does economic livelihood consist? How can a decent living be secured? As the twentieth century dawned, most US working people addressed these questions practically, amid whatever circumstances and choices their daily labors afforded. Meanwhile, religious and political leaders, and some scholars, sought to give public voice to the concerns and hopes these workers’ struggles bespoke. The most effective among them managed to wed a sturdy vision of economic livelihood to specific strategies for moving from vision to reality.

Turn-of-the-century US Catholics’ efforts to understand and to promote economic justice took multiple routes: theoretical and practical, informal and organized, official and popular. The resulting concatenation of thought and teaching, activism and everyday life bred a distinctive US Catholic contribution to working people’s quest for a good living in modern market economies. US social Catholicism situated economy’s role within a complex picture of personal and communal flourishing, making its vision remarkably comprehensive. At the same time, its concern to realize worker justice in the concrete led to be specific and strategic.

Twentieth-century Catholic economic thought and activism were inspired and shaped by a series of modern papal social teachings, beginning with Pope Leo XIII’s 1891 social encyclical, Rerum novarum. Leo and his successors sought to address the moral and practical challenges posed to workers and citizens by modern industrialized market economies. Official teachings gave special attention to the plights of the poor and working-class families most vulnerable to market vagaries. In the United States, this emergent body of official Catholic social teaching found its most influential US interpreter and spokesperson in Monsignor John Augustine Ryan (1869–1945), a Minnesota-born priest, Catholic University professor of industrial ethics, and director of the Social Action Department of the US bishops’ National Catholic Welfare Council.

Through copious writings and tireless public advocacy, Ryan gained a wide hearing for a US Catholic vision of justice for working families that was impressive for its detail and scope. His widely collaborative legislative and policy efforts were instrumental in passing early minimum wage legislation in Oregon and Minnesota (1913); and his economic writings influenced Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s policies.¹ Through scholarly books and essays, pamphlets, journalistic articles, and public speeches, Ryan articulated the normative purposes of the modern market economy and laid out a case for social-economic reform whose centerpiece was access to a decent livelihood that would ensure all families the minimum material conditions for a good life. Justly remunerated work in humane conditions was the way most people could expect to procure these benefits. At the same time, Ryan’s social Catholic perspective led him to regard work as but one part of the well-lived life that economic institutions and activities are meant to support.

A priest trained in economics and an academic engaged in the public arena, Ryan seized every available venue to champion the cause of workers and their families. His political-economic vision had its limits and flaws, and his moral and theological vocabulary and perspective bear marks of his social and ecclesial context. Yet through his teaching and writing, his indefatigable advocacy for work justice, and his political engagement, Ryan achieved a creative fusion of US and Catholic social economics unparalleled before or since. In the particularities of his biography, Ryan also embodies and symbolizes the center of gravity (white, male, clerically led, son of immigrants from working-class roots) around which most twentieth-century US American Catholic Church polity and leadership revolved. Ryan’s contributions provide rich historical antecedents and resources from which a twenty-first-century Catholic economic ethic can profitably learn and draw. In fact, for hammering out a contemporary US Catholic livelihood agenda, we will find no better dialogue partner—and at times, foil—than the man whom critics nicknamed, in the aftermath of the Great Depression, the “Right Reverend New Dealer.” This chapter examines how US Catholics addressed the economic well-being of working families during the period between 1900 and 1950, giving special attention to the work and legacy of the inimitable monsignor.

CATHOLIC WORKING-CLASS FAMILIES AND NEIGHBORS, CIRCA 1900

Over a public career spanning more than four decades, John A. Ryan’s multifaceted engagements were united by a passionate concern for US working families and the economic difficulties that beset them. While never forgetting farming families in rural communities like his own northern Minnesota hometown, Ryan’s energies centered on the plight of working-class families in the industrialized cities where Catholic populations were largest. By the later nineteenth century, a modernizing market economy was decisively reshaping the lives of most working Americans. As Ryan’s first book, A Living Wage, went to press in 1905, the realities of industrialization, urbanization, and new waves of immigration and internal migration continued to powerfully influence the fortunes of ordinary participants in the nation’s economic life.²

Working-class families seeking a good living had long tended to concentrate in populous urban centers. With ample supplies of entry-level jobs and cheap (if inadequate) housing, large northeastern and midwestern cities attracted throngs of immigrants who included large numbers of Catholics.³ Between 1890 and 1945, these urban Catholic families formed a shifting patchwork of communities of relatively recent immigrant background, mostly—albeit not completely—of European extraction. By 1900 the most established Catholic communities in these urban centers were among the faithful of Irish and German descent.⁴ The predominance of Irish and German Americans in church leadership testified to the influence of these groups within ecclesial ranks. Simultaneously, the active involvement of Irish American and other Catholics in urban politics and in the labor union movement bespoke the civic status that many had attained.⁵

The turn of the century witnessed a fresh surge of immigration from nations in southern and Eastern Europe, including Poland, Italy, and the Balkans, countries with large numbers of Catholics.⁶ Like their coreligionists before them, Catholic “new immigrants” congregated in urban enclaves, speedily establishing parish communities where worship and religious instruction often took place in their native tongues. In “national” parishes and ethnically homogeneous Catholic neighborhoods, often coexisting—more or less peacefully—within blocks of one another, members sought to preserve in the new world their distinctive cultural identities and practices.⁷ Parishes served both as spiritual centers and as focal points for neighborhood life.

Working-class Catholics’ experiences during these years varied depending on their cultural and racial-ethnic backgrounds. After 1900, as nativist sentiments sharpened, Eastern and southern European immigrants became the frequent targets of public intolerance, including by their English-speaking Irish and prosperous German fellow Catholics. American-born Hispanic and African American Catholics, emigrating from the rural South and Southwest into large cities in increasing numbers, encountered especially severe discrimination at the hands of their white Catholic neighbors. Meanwhile, US Catholics as a whole continued to be affected by a sense of being “other” in relation to the convictions and culture of the Protestant mainstream.⁸ In different ways and to varying degrees, most Catholics during this period experienced the tensions between participation and marginalization, and between assimilation into a new culture and preservation of the old, that marked the experiences of immigrants and migrants generally.

Urban Working Families in the Crucible of Economic Modernization

Fueling all this were the epochal changes that accompanied the rise of the modern industrial market economy. In the United States as elsewhere, working-class families grappled with the challenges this economy posed to their material survival and the opportunities it held for material betterment. Amid tensions and differences, more established “white” Catholics, newly arriving Eastern and southern European Catholics, urbanizing Hispanic Catholics, and Catholics (and Catholic converts) among African Americans migrating from the South into northern cities like Detroit and Chicago, together formed a large, though disunified, de facto Catholic working class. For recent immigrants, the literal move from old country to new world telescoped and intensified what for others had been a more gradual process of encounter and adaptation to the changed living and working conditions of the industrialized and urbanized economy. Whatever the differences that separated them, working- and lower-middle-class Catholics and their neighbors had all found themselves compelled to accommodate to the new world of economic modernity.

Early twentieth-century working families contended with city life at a time when distinctions between rural-agricultural and urban-industrial cultures had grown increasingly sharp.⁹ Families who had left rural, agricultural communities—whether in the US South, the Southwest, or Europe—to seek their fortunes in urban centers found themselves negotiating unfamiliar geographical, cultural, and economic terrain. Most obvious were the sheer physical differences between the spacious and land-connected environment of the farm or village and the crowded, artificial, and frequently unhealthy living conditions that obtained for non-elites in the cities. Repugnant and unsanitary aspects of life in places like turn-of-the-century New York and Chicago fueled demand by the middle classes for public works projects, including sanitation systems, parks, and paved streets. For those who could afford to escape city noise and squalor, new trends toward suburbanization and rising demand for cheap and fast means of transport between outlying areas and downtown business and cultural centers were already well under way.

But few urban poor or working-class families could indulge in this popular American practice of picking up and moving on—or out—to purportedly greener suburban pastures. Many 1900s working-class families lived a virtually proletarian city existence, depending for survival on unreliable work that offered paltry pay, little security, and few or no benefits. The shift from the meager self-sufficiency attainable by farming to dependence on wages and purchased commodities in the cities left the working poor particularly vulnerable. Whether one remained on the farm or not, whether one was native-born or newly arrived, “industrialization and urbanization so transformed the United States [by] the late nineteenth and early twentieth century that all Americans . . . had to confront changing life patterns.”¹⁰ In the economic sphere, these changes had fundamentally dislocated traditional markers of order, space, and time. David M. Katzman and William M. Tuttle describe this shift: “As producers and consumers, Americans became interdependent on each other...