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In 1840, Ozanam published Reflections on the Doctrine of Saint-Simon, a scathing critique of the degradation of work under industrial capitalism similar in tone and analysis to Marx's later and better-known Communist Manifesto.  Ozanam differed from Marx in two significant ways:  first, he looked back to the medieval guilds as a model of worker control, and second, he rejected the dictatorship of the proletariat in favor of more limited state intervention in the economy.  His embrace of democracy put him at odds with conservative Catholics; his critique of the market put him at odds with liberals; his critique of the state put him at odds with socialists.  Following Ozanam's untimely death at the age of 40 in 1853, those who took up the mantle of liberal Catholicism would find themselves in a similarly marginal position.

The second half of the 19th century saw greater clerical involvement in the social deaconry.  Baron Wilhelm Emmanuel von Ketteler, Bishop of Mainz, sought to deepen Ozanam's liberalism by incorporating Thomistic philosophy into Catholic social critique.  His 1864 work The Labor Question and Christianity looked once again to the guilds as a middle path between the state and the market, but also emphasized that any meaningful social transformation required an "interior regeneration of the heart" on the part of all citizens.  Clerical activism reached its 19th-century zenith in the career of Henry Edward Manning, Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster.  Over the objections of politically quiescent old English Catholics, Manning publicly aligned himself with the labor movement in 1872.  He played a key role in mediating the bloody London dock strike of 1889; British workers showed their appreciation by carrying his portrait alongside that of Karl Marx in their 1890 May Day celebration.  Like liberal Catholics before him, Manning endorsed limited state action on behalf of social welfare, but warned against the dangers of centralization latent in existing theories of state socialism.

Liberal Catholics such as Ozanam, von Ketteler, and Manning were hardly representative of 19th-century Catholic leaders, lay or clerical.  Amazingly, they proved to be the dominant influence on the most significant statement of modern Catholic social teaching, Pope Leo XIII's 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum.  The encyclical refused to endorse specific programs or social systems, averring that the particulars of history and culture preclude any single solution to problems of industrial civilization.  Still, Leo endorsed all the general principles of the liberal Catholic third way:  the acceptance of democracy; the right of labor to organize; a legitimate role for limited state intervention in the economy; and a willingness to work across confessional lines for common social goals. The encyclical also reaffirmed the conservative Catholic emphases on cross-class harmony and the inescapably moral nature of all social problems.

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February (Web-only) 2003, Vol. 47