Catholic Labor Movements in Europe. Social Thought and Action, 1914–1965 by Paul Misner (review)

The collective task of putting Catholicism back into the history of twentieth-century Europe continues to gather momentum. Paul Misner makes an important contribution with his new monograph, which serves as a chronological successor to his well-regarded Social Catholicism in Europe: from the onset of industrialization to the First World War (1991). In this second volume, Misner sets himself the goal of providing a transnational history of how the movements, ideas, and institutions of the Social Catholic world—comprising, in his capacious definition, trade unions and social and spiritual organizations as well as a wide range of intellectual reviews and more informal networks—expanded their social, intellectual, and political power, within and without the confessional boundaries of Catholicism in the decades from World War I to the 1960s. Misner rightly has no doubt as to the importance of this process. The ideas and institutions of Social Catholicism, as he demonstrates, constituted an energetic component of European Catholicism in this period, but they also contributed significantly to the amalgam of political, social, and economic ideas that comprised the mid-century democratic settlement of Western Europe after 1945. This is therefore a story which matters and one which he presents very effectively, in a series of largely chronological chapters which criss-cross the territories of the western half of Europe from the Low Countries, to Germany, France, Austria, and Italy. His approach is sympathetic, though certainly not uncritically so: he demonstrates the engagement of the more reactionary elements of Social Catholicism with the various authoritarian and corporatist projects of the 1930s and 1940s, but he emphasizes also how the ideas and institutions of Social Catholicism were predominantly a force for good, contributing to processes of social emancipation, welfare provision, internationalism, and the achievement of an enhanced economic and political democracy. This is a vision of Social Catholicism which finds its centre of gravity in north-western Europe, and it is not surprising that much of his book is devoted to the Low Countries and to the territories of western Germany. France and Italy fit less well into this model and are correspondingly somewhat more marginal to his account. It is also one which prioritizes the internal momentum of Social Catholicism over broader forces. What carried its ideas and institutions forward, as presented by Misner, was less the currents of the age than the ceaseless energy of debate, organization, and practice within Social Catholic ranks. This is, thus, a book full of the names of the individuals and organizations who contributed to the different institutions, international networks, and publications of the Social Catholic world. This leads Misner occasionally into somewhat teleological logics, whereby each successive generation built on the achievements of the preceding ones, and laid the basis for those who would come after them. It is also, consequently, somewhat top-down in its approach. We learn much about leaders but less about the mentality of the rank and file, or the simple hard work of those militants who kept Catholic trade unions, spiritual organizations, and periodicals going in difficult times. Above all, this is a book which, as is so often the case in studies of twentieth-century Catholicism, is better on beginnings than endings. In particular, the book struggles to retain its momentum after 1945. After the war, Social Catholics had achieved much of what they had striven for over the previous half-century: their ideas were widely accepted, within and beyond Catholic ranks, and the new socio-economic structures of the states of Western Europe bore the imprint of their priorities of social justice and economic democracy. And yet, as Misner shows, within twenty years, much of the infrastructure and sense of collective purpose of this Social Catholic world had been disassembled, as confessional organizations were replaced in the 1960s by Catholic participation in more fluid and open organizational structures, where their influence...