We continue the reflections on the role of Catholicism in the history of our nation, now 250 years into its existence. Last month, we considered the nation’s entry into the 20th century, a time characterized by the increased industrialization of our nation, the social ills that followed this change, and the Church’s response through its social teachings that defended the dignity of workers in this new industrialized setting.

With the coming of the Great Depression, the nation’s industries and the broader economy experienced an economic collapse. Unemployment soared; homelessness, bank failures, hunger, and a loss of confidence in the economic order of the nation followed. The immediate response of the Church was to take on Jesus’ command to care for the least among us (cf. Matthew 25) through direct charity and relief (e.g., Catholic Charities), to assert a personal and radical solidarity with the poor (e.g., Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker Movement), to assert anew the social doctrine earlier proposed by Pope Leo XIII (e.g., Pope Pius XI’s Quadragesimo anno), and to engage politically with President Roosevelt and his New Deal.

Diocesan organizations like Catholic Charities took the lead to provide an immediate response to human suffering. Catholics realized that, with the sheer magnitude of the suffering before them, private philanthropy could not adequately address the vastness of the suffering. Working together, institutions like Catholic Charities provided food, clothing, shelter, assistance to families, care of children, and other forms of emergency relief. While it immediately became clear that government intervention would be needed to provide for the great needs, the Church never ceded this care of the poor to the government alone, for it recognized its essential role in providing for the poor, even while the government had its distinct responsibility. The suffering of the Depression Era, however, raised a question deeper than how the Church should feed the hungry: Why were so many Americans hungry in the first place?

In response to this vexing question, Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin founded the Catholic Worker Movement in 1933, the heart of the Great Depression. The Catholic Worker did not regard poverty merely as an unfortunate accident to be relieved after the fact. Day and Maurin challenged Christians to examine the structures and assumptions of an economic order that could produce both enormous wealth and widespread destitution. The Catholic Worker sought not merely a better-regulated capitalism but a transformation of social relationships through personal responsibility, community, voluntary poverty, and the works of mercy. While organizations like Catholic Charities increasingly cooperated with public institutions to meet the emergency, Dorothy Day created communities in which the poor were received personally as neighbors and, ultimately, as Christ.

The Catholic critique of unfettered capitalism, offered by entities like the Catholic Worker, based its appraisal in Catholic social teaching, including that of Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum and Pope Pius XI’s 1931 contemporary encyclical Quadragesimo Anno. Catholic social teaching did not reject private property, economic freedom, or the market itself. But it rejected the idea that economic life could be governed solely by competition, profit, or individual self-interest. Pius XI also rejected socialism as the solution. The Catholic alternative was neither laissez-faire capitalism nor revolutionary socialism, but a social order governed by justice, the dignity of the human person, the rights of workers, responsible private ownership, associations and intermediary institutions, and the legitimate role of public authority. 

In the United States, the thought of Monsignor John A. Ryan (1869-1945) was instrumental in shaping the American bishops’ 1919 Program of Social Reconstruction, which advocated such measures as a living wage, protection of workers, social insurance, and labor organization —ideas that appeared remarkably congenial to many later New Deal reforms. 

However, the Church did not issue a blanket ecclesiastical endorsement of every New Deal program, nor were all bishops or Catholic leaders politically united. Nevertheless, the broad picture is one of substantial Catholic support for Roosevelt, particularly among urban and working-class Catholics. In the New Deal, Catholics saw a means of unemployment relief, protection of workers, sanctioning of labor organization, advocating minimum wages and fair labor standards, establishing public provision of social and old-age assistance, and providing a greater regulation of powerful economic interests. Monsignor Ryan became perhaps the most prominent Catholic defender of Roosevelt. He believed that the New Deal represented the most significant American effort to embody principles of social justice that Catholic thinkers had been advocating for decades. His support was so conspicuous that he acquired the nickname “Right Reverend New Dealer.” But Catholic support was not unanimous. Instead, some prominent Catholic critics challenged both the adequacy of the New Deal and the expansion of federal power.

The Catholic Church’s experience during the Great Depression demonstrated that Christian charity could not be reduced to occasional generosity toward the unfortunate. The scale of suffering forced Catholics to confront the moral structures of economic life itself. Catholic Charities fed and sheltered the poor; Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker called Christians into personal solidarity with them; Catholic social teaching condemned the injustices of an economic order governed by unrestrained competition; and Catholic leaders such as Monsignor Ryan found in the New Deal an imperfect but significant effort to place the resources of the state at the service of the common good.

The Catholic contribution to the New Deal era was therefore neither a simple endorsement of government nor a rejection of the American economic system. It was an attempt to insist that economics must remain subject to morality — and that a society cannot call itself prosperous if its prosperity leaves millions without work, security, dignity, or hope.

Next month: World War II and the Global Role of America