An online search for material related to Catholic social action in the early twentieth-century produces an article by Virginia M Crawford. Published in the September 1922 edition of Studies, the Irish quarterly review published by the Irish Jesuits since 1912 with a focus on Irish social, political, cultural and economic issues.
Crawford’s article is a review of three books, although ten of the eleven pages are about one book by Parker T Moon, The Labour Problem and the Catholic Social Movement in France, published by Macmillan in 1921. That title should be enough to draw the attention of anyone interested in the history of Catholic Social Theology and social action, although I suspect that it lies mostly unread in university library stacks.
Moon (1892 – 1936) was a significant academic figure in the first decades of the twentieth century; educated and teaching at Columbia University where he specialised in political science, international relations and international peace, and was a delegate to the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. A convert to Roman Catholicism he served as president of both the American Catholic Historical Association and the Catholic Association for World Peace.
Crawford (1862 – 1948) was also a convert to Roman Catholicism, taking inspiration from Cardinal Manning and the Catholic church’s recent forays into social engagement. An early marital scandal and subsequent divorce seem to have been something of an energising kickstart in her life, as she subsequently dedicated her energies to campaigning journalism, and the founding of the Catholic Women’s Suffrage Society.
Fluent in French and familiar with Catholic social action and campaigns across Europe, Crawford describes Moon’s assessment of the Catholic social movement in France as ‘very able’, but the insight she adds makes the review a source in itself on the influence and impact of Catholic Social Teaching in the years soon after the publication of Rerum Novarum in 1891. Drawing on her knowledge of action by church people in response to issues of poverty and social need she describes how some French employers in the first half of the nineteenth century built new factories outside cities with good accommodation, schools, and healthcare provision, much as in England we might associate with Bourneville and Saltaire. These sought to address concerns about excessive working hours, poor conditions, and the horrific demands made on child workers:
‘Immediately after the close of the Napoleonic wars mills and factories sprang up in Northern and Eastern France, and all the horrors of unprotected labour were produced there as elsewhere – men and women toiling fifteen hours a day and little children from four upwards working beside them, in order (argued the manufacturers that the baby fingers might acquire the necessary textile dexterity.’
The examples from France seem to have been well known but Crawford’s concluded that the French church was better at developing thought than action and pointed to the church in Germany as providing some of the earliest and most effective criticisms of working conditions and the impact of the industrial revolution:
‘Germany was the only country in which the Catholic clergy vigorously combated the abuses of Capitalism without waiting to be urged on by anxiety concerning the Socialist peril.’
Looking to the Catholic church in England and its response to social injustices Crawford pointed to the seeming lonely figure of Cardinal Manning (1808-1892), who was her regular confessor and whom she interviewed for the Pall Mall Gazette. Rerum Novarum, on the Rights and Duties of Capital and Labour, now regarded as a key moment in the development of Catholic Social Teaching, had been issued by Pope Leo XIII in May 1891. Manning influenced the thinking underlying the encyclical but even so Crawford comments that on its publication, Rerum Novarum ‘excited but little comment among us and remained wholly without influence.’
‘Cardinal Manning unhappily stood absolutely alone in his championship of the worker as far as English Catholics were concerned. His intervention in the Dock Strike was even more unpopular with them than his passion for Total Abstinence.’
It would be another twenty years before attention was paid and the principals of Rerum Novarum applied through the work of the Jesuit, Charles Plater, who founded the Catholic Social Guild so that ‘a section at least of English Catholics gave serious attention to the social problems of the hour.’
Crawford’s writing and activism are not entirely forgotten, resurfacing in comment and research, and continuing in some way through charitable organisations with which she had been associated. The Catholic Women’s Suffrage Society that she helped to found published a magazine to which she contributed. Reviewing its influence many years later Jacqueline R DeVries writes;
The Catholic Citizen gave voice to a remarkably confident and well-defined Catholic feminist vision that emphasised economic, political, and legal equality for women and promoted women’s active and engaged citizenship.
Virginia Crawford’s review published in Studies in 1922 shows a depth and breadth of knowledge about issues of social need and injustice, and the work of the Catholic Church across Europe to address those issues, and signals much of that confident and well-defined Catholic feminist vision that surely merits recognition in the history of Catholic Social Teaching.
- Crawford, Virginia M., ‘The Catholic Social Movement in France’, Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review Vol. 11, No. 43 (Sep., 1922), pp. 424-434.
- DeVries, ‘A Periodical of Their Own: Feminist Writing in Religious Print Media’ in Women’s Periodicals and Print Culture in Britain, 1918-1939: The Interwar Period Catherine Clay et al., Edinburgh University Press, 2018
- Parker Thomas Moon – Wikipedia
- Virginia Mary Crawford – Wikipedia
- Portrait of Virginia Mary Crawford (1862–1948) from The Sketch, Vol. XII, No. 155, January 15, 1896, page 600.
Colin Brady 