A pre-modern interpretation of the modern: the English Catholic church and the ‘social question’ in the early twentieth century

Towards the close of the first decade of the twentieth century there emerged an organized movement within the English Catholic Church which can be distinguished as Social Catholicism. The Catholic Social Guild (CSG), which was founded at the Catholic Truth Society Conference in September 1909, largely represented Social Catholicism in England and, as such, constitutes the focal point of this paper. This small body comprised laypeople, secular priests, and members of religious orders. Of the lay component a significant number of middle-class converts to Catholicism were prominent; whilst at parish level working men and women were recruited largely through schemes of social study. Social Catholicism represented a novel phenomenon not only because of its essential focus upon addressing some of the more intractable social problems of the day but also because it embodied an inherently different social rationale from that of more mainstream Catholic endeavour in this field. Looking back to the Church of medieval times, Social Catholicism perceived an ideal Church which, through its social precepts and actions, had exerted an exemplary socio-economic influence. Moreover such an historical precedent might embody the answer to the ‘social question’ – a multiform modern problematic – provided the Catholic Church could transform its past experience of a pre-modern social engagement into initiatives of theoretical and practical relevance to the modern situation.