The Social Action Department: Ryan to Higgins
If Coughlin and his Christian Front is where the defensive Americanism found its voice, the other Americanism found something sturdier than a voice. It found a department. When the American bishops reorganized their wartime council into the National Catholic Welfare Council in 1919, they built into it a Social Action Department, one of the branches of the new secretariat, charged with carrying Catholic social teaching into industrial and economic life. [1] The department outlived every man who ran it, and that is the point. The pluralist strain did not depend on a single broadcaster. It had an institution, a staff, and a filing cabinet, all of which are now at Catholic University.
Its first director set its character. John A. Ryan, a professor of moral theology at Catholic University from 1915 to 1939, had read Rerum Novarum as a young man and spent his life turning it into policy. He wrote A Living Wage in 1906, the first American book on the subject, and he drafted the Bishops' Program of Social Reconstruction in 1919, a plan for minimum wage laws, insurance for the sick and the old, and an end to child labor that critics called socialistic and that the New Deal then largely enacted. When the bishops needed someone to run the Social Action Department, they appointed Ryan, whom Higgins would later call “the intellectual architect of American Catholic social action.” [2] This is the same Ryan who went on the radio in 1936 to answer Coughlin directly in a defense of President Roosevelt. [3]
The two Americanisms were not abstractions. They argued on the air, and they argued inside the same church.
The department ran on a particular kind of priest, sometimes dubbed “the labor priest,” and Catholic University holds the papers of the three most important: Ryan, Francis Haas, and George Higgins. Haas, a federal mediator who helped settle some fifteen hundred strikes before he was named a bishop in 1943, was the doer to Ryan's thinker. As Higgins put it, “Ryan originated ideas, Haas put them into practice.” Raymond McGowan, Ryan's longtime assistant, carried the department through the years after Ryan's death in 1945. [4]
Then Higgins. He came to Catholic University in the early 1940s, finished his doctorate in 1944, and walked straight into the Social Action Department, where he stayed for thirty-six years, directing it from 1954 to 1967.
He had sat in Haas's Sunday lectures. He inherited Ryan's conviction that the church “makes visible its presence in the labor movement,” and he became, in one union leader's phrase, a translator between Catholics and trade unionists. The farm workers knew him. [5]
The reason this lineage belongs in a collection about antisemitism is that a priest involved in the proceedings of Nostra Aetate came out of it.
Higgins did not arrive at Catholic-Jewish relations from theology. He arrived from the shop floor. The social action world had put Catholics and Jews in the same union halls for two generations, and Eugene Fisher argues it was that shared labor experience that made interfaith work feel natural to Higgins. [6]
The department that answered Coughlin in 1936 is the department that formed the American priest who, thirty years later, would help the church say in council that the Jews are not cursed. The embrace strain had a home, and the home kept good records.
References/notes
1. Maria Mazzenga, “From War to Welfare,” The Archivist's Nook (2022); Douglas J. Slawson, The Foundation and First Decade of the NCWC (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1992).
2. The phrase “the intellectual architect of American Catholic social action” is Higgins's own, in George G. Higgins, Organized Labor and the Church (New York: Paulist Press, 1993); see also Mazzenga, “What the Heck Is a Labor Priest?,” The Archivist's Nook (2016).
3. Francis L. Broderick, Right Reverend New Dealer: John A. Ryan (New York: Macmillan, 1963).
4. Records of the Department of Social Action, finding aid, American Catholic History Research Center and University Archives (ACUA), Catholic University of America (McGowan series, 1920–1954).
5. Mazzenga, “What the Heck Is a Labor Priest?,” The Archivist's Nook (2016); George Gilmary Higgins Papers, finding aid, ACUA, Catholic University of America.
6. Eugene J. Fisher, “Catholic-Jewish Relations,” U.S. Catholic Historian 19, no. 4 (2001).