Roman Catholicism and Organized Labor ...

In our discussion of religion and the secular Left, Jonathan Dresner and I referred to the attitude of American Catholicism toward organized labor. Our colleague, Ken Heineman, is the author of A Catholic New Deal: Religion and Reform in Depression Pittsburgh and knows more about that subject than either of us do. So I asked Ken to enlighten us. He has grown shy about posting at Cliopatria, however, and replied in an e-mail, as follows:

The American Catholic Church (or Leo XIII and Pius XIII) were not anti-union. Leo XIII in The Condition of Labor (1891) approved of labor organization and Pius XI reaffirmed Leo's encyclical in After 40 Years (on social reconstruction). The American bishops of the industrial heartland embraced the CIO in the 1930s while those in Boston and New York were hostile. However, the labor organizing action is in the Midwest and Western Pennsylvania and Upstate New York, not in the old urban East Coast core. (Baltimore priests, though, also embraced the CIO.) Pro-labor diocese's: Pittsburgh, Buffalo, Milwaukee, Detroit (after Coughlin was shut up by a new bishop), Toledo, Cleveland, Amarillo, Baltimore, and San Francisco. I have made the argument--and it has not been disproved to date--that the steel workers' union, the Catholic Church, and the New Deal Democratic Party formed an"industrial trinity" in 1930s Pittsburgh. The executive council of the National Catholic Welfare Conference (the predecessor of the bishops' conference) was stacked with pro-CIO bishops from the heartland: Boyle (Pittsburgh), Alter (Toledo), Schrembs (Cleveland), Duffy (Buffalo), and others. They wrote pastoral letters defending the CIO, denouncing both predatory capitalism and atheistic communism as the bastard twins of the secular Enlightenment. I have contended, and do believe, that the Catholic church was to the steel workers what the black church was to the southern civil rights movement. There is some literature published on this topic which is cited in, A Catholic New Deal: Religion and Reform in Depression Pittsburgh (Penn State Press, 1999).