“The Golden Age of Catholic Social Action”

The 1930’s saw priests, religious and laypeople vigorously working for social justice. In 1933 Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin started the Catholic Worker with its threefold program of a newspaper, soup kitchens and “Houses of hospitality.” The Catholic Worker was an unparalleled attempt by Catholics to live out a radically evangelical form of poverty in solidarity with the poor. Priests started labor schools to educate Catholic workers about their rights and to warn them about communism. David O’Brien calls this decade “the golden age of Catholic social action.”

Today in 1937 marks the founding of the Association of Catholic Trade Unionists in New York City by former Catholic Worker members. ACTU defined its mission as spreading the Church’s teachings on labor, specifically citing Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum and Pius XI’s Quadragesimo Anno (1931). It spread across the country, supporting workers on strike and fighting both Communism and racketeering in the unions. By the 1950’s most of labor’s big battles had been won, and the Church was moving into new areas of social action such as the Civil Rights and peace movements. By the 1960’s the ACTU and other groups like it had gone out of existence. But they were an important attemot to implemenet the Church’s social teaching, and as such shouldn’t be forgotten.