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These students have come, not coincidentally, from public and private schools informed by the verities of Progressive Ed. Here, Woods acknowledges that Catholic educational theorists like Thomas Edward Shields and Edward A. Pace shared many Deweyan concerns about liberating children from lifeless pedagogical routine. In fact, he notes, they even believed that Progressive pedagogy had been "employed by Christ himself." But they also recoiled from Dewey's emphasis on process and inquiry over content and objective truth—an emphasis which, they suspected, would foster subjectivism and nihilism. They also feared that the "practicality" enjoined by progressive educators would entail the overshadowing of the humanities by science and business instruction. (One wonders what they would think of our mandatory and desperate courses in "business ethics.") And they realized that progressive pedagogy envisioned a nonsectarian democratic nationalism in which Catholic particularity would be drowned. So when they adopted progressive methods, "it was the letter and not the spirit that they followed" in making the new pedagogy serve the ends of Catholic formation.

The debate over education spilled over into a larger battle, conducted on the new terrain of "social science," over the nature of human society. Against sociologists like Albion Small and Lester Frank Ward, and against Protestant social gospellers like Walter Rauschenbusch and Washington Gladden, Catholic social scientists like Frs. William Kerby and John Burke insisted on the reality of humanity's supernatural telos, the anti-utopian implications of original sin, and the philosophical indispensability of Thomist natural law. Now there are serious problems here: Woods obscures the Protestant origins of American sociology, and repeats canards about Social Gospel "optimism" which have long been discredited. But he also realizes that, despite their claims to democratic inclusiveness, Progressive sociologists and social workers were subtly and sometimes overtly technocratic, and that their conceptions of social welfare could undermine individual dignity.2

The chasm separating Catholics from Progressives was also evident in their answers to "the social question." Where Progressives (and to a lesser extent Protestants) saw economic justice as a matter of humanitarian or socialist expertise, Catholic reformers like John Ryan and Joseph Husslein offered "corporatist" models of class cooperation based on function and religious spirit, and they even attributed the condition of labor to the individualist "social and ideological consequences of the Protestant Reformation." Conceding the many areas of policy agreement, Woods underlines the differences between Catholics' natural-law approach and Progressives' reliance on materialist arguments from utility and efficiency. Taking their cue from Pope Leo XIII's Rerum novarum (1891), but also employing Progressive criteria, Ryan and Husslein argued that natural law mandated living (not minimum) wages, just prices, workers' right to organize, and a state that intervened (frequently) to regulate industry and ensure social welfare. Readers will especially benefit from Woods' account of the Catholic idealization of guilds, modern forms of which, they thought, would democratize factories, compose class conflict by structuring caritas into the workplace, and revive artisanal skill against the division of labor.

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