Quite a few items on the economic
and social justice front this week, so we’ll get right to it:
• Our receipt last week of a very rare copy of Msgr. John A.
Ryan’s autobiography, Social Doctrine in
Action (1941) raised a few questions.
Some of the odd omissions led us to do a search of newspaper archives
before and after the book’s publication to see if we could come up with
something to fill in the blanks. What we
found was far more than we expected. For
example, we discovered that, while Msgr. Ryan, noted as “Father of the Minimum
Wage,” and Fr. Charles Coughlin, the noted “radio priest,” were once on
friendly terms (Msgr. Ryan once declared that Fr. Coughlin was “on the side of
the angels” — Donald Pond, “The Crusader of the Air: Boos for Al [Smith] Mark
Father Coughlin’s Attack on ‘Happy Warrior’,” The Pittsburgh Press (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania), Tuesday, January
9, 1934, 21), Msgr. Ryan attacked him bitterly when Fr. Coughlin began
criticizing FDR and the New Deal (“Monsignor Raps Father Coughlin: The Right
Rev. John A. Ryan Speaks Under Democratic Auspices,” The Spokesman-Review (Spokane, Washington), Friday, October 9,
1936, 2), and Fr. Coughlin returned the favor with interest (“Father Coughlin
Will Answer Monsignor Ryan,” Lewiston
Daily Sun, October 2, 1936, 1). It
got so bad that Archbishop Michael Curley of Baltimore called on both Msgr.
Ryan and Fr. Coughlin to “do a great favor to the church [sic] and to the country at large” by “retir[ing] for some time to
the Carthusian order, where perpetual silence is observed.” (“Church Organ Raps
Priests: Paper Says Coughlin And Ryan Should ‘Rest A While’,” Reading Eagle, October 16, 1936, 2;
“Coughlin and Ryan Asked to ‘Shut Up’,” The
Florence Times, October 16, 1936, 1).
The future Pope Pius XII refused to have anything to do with either of
them. (“Cardinal Pacelli Arrives in New
York for Visit,” Lewiston Daily Sun,
October 2, 1936, 1.) Msgr. Ryan’s
students and associates attacked Fulton Sheen repeatedly, using an organization
called “the Catholic Radical Alliance” as a bully pulpit to advance Msgr.
Ryan’s social programs. (George A. Coleman, “Links Alliance With Fascist
Forces,” The Pittsburgh Press,
Friday, July 30, 1937, 19; “Rev. Rice
Hits Msgr. Sheen’s Labor Views: Catholic Radical Alliance Spokesman Replies to
Orator’s Charges” The Pittsburgh Press,
Wednesday, March 2, 1938, 5.) There were
a number of calls for a planned economy and greater State control of
business. (“Says Planned Production Is
Nation’s Need, Monsignor Ryan Speaker At Catholic Social Action Congress,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, June 13, 1939,
3.)
• While all of that was
interesting to find out about Msgr. Ryan, most surprising was the report of a
talk the Father of the Minimum Wage gave at Howard University on March 2, 1943,
before an audience consisting almost entirely of Black Americans, in which he
insisted that segregation (“jim crow”) was essential to prevent intermarriage
of Blacks and Whites. (Michael Carter,
“Colored Girls May Not Live in Catholic University Dorms: Rev. John Ryan Says
Two on Campus Are Haitians, but That Is Different,” Baltimore Afro-American, March 20, 1943, 14.) At one point Msgr.
Ryan attempted to tell a “joke” in extraordinarily poor taste (to say the
least), using a word that starts with “n”, ends in “r” and has "ig" in the middle not generally used in
polite company even in 1943 — much less before a Black audience — whereupon
“The audience gasped. That epithet had
not been heard at Howard University in a good many years from the platform.”
(“H.U. Gasps as Monsignor Uses Epithet,” Baltimore
Afro-American, March 20, 1943, 14.)
Other sound bites included, “Of course, intermarriage is out.” “I don’t know any reasons for a mixed
army.” “[E]conomic equality does not go
hand in hand with social equality. . . . There is a border between economic
equality and intermarriage.” “Jobs are
the most important things.”
• Early today we sent an outreach letter to the Notre Dame Center for Ethics and Culture
regarding the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. CESJ’s contention (based on the analysis of
William Winslow Crosskey in Politics and
the Constitution in the History of the United States, Chicago, Illinois:
University of Chicago Press, 1953) is that the current interpretation of the
Fourteenth Amendment is based on the egregiously incorrect U.S. Supreme Court
decision handed down in the Slaughterhouse
Cases of 1873. We invited Dr. O. Carter Snead, Director of the Center for
Ethics and Culture, to give Dr. Norman Kurland (who had Crosskey for
Constitutional Law when he attended the University of Chicago Law School) a
call to discuss Crosskey’s analysis in light of CESJ’s proposed pro-life
economic agenda. CESJ has also submitted
a proposal for a paper to be delivered at the annual conference in October at
Notre Dame.
• Members of the CESJ core group had a meeting on Monday
with Bishop Don Williams. Bishop
Williams was referred to CESJ by the Rev. Virgil Wood of Houston, Texas, a
long-time supporter of CESJ. Bishop
Williams is active as a leader in Bread for the
World, and is interested in the Just Third Way as possibly having the
potential to bring a just and sustainable solution to poverty. Bishop Williams likes the idea of the Just
Third Way with its emphasis on power, private property, and justice, and the
linkage of economics and ethics.
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| Fr. Krause, second row, second from right. |
• Father Edward Krause, C.S.C., Ph.D., former professor of
social ethics at Gannon University and member of the CESJ Board of Counselors,
is following up on the application for the imprimatur for Easter Witness (below).
Father Krause has been very active at working to arrange for members of
the CESJ core group to speak in venues in colleges and universities, where the
Just Third Way might have the potential to resolve a number of the problems
that have been cropping up in the Groves of Academe.
• CESJ’s latest book, Easter
Witness: From Broken Dream to a New Vision for Ireland, is available from Amazon
and Barnes
and Noble, as well as by special order from many “regular” bookstores. The book can also be ordered in bulk, which
we define as ten copies or more of the same title, at a 20% discount. A full case is twenty-six copies, and
non-institutional/non-vendor purchasers get a 20% discount off the $20 cover
price on wholesale lots ($416/case).
Shipping is extra. Send enquiries
to publications@cesj.org. An additional discount may be available for
institutions such as schools, clubs, and other organizations as well as
retailers.
• Evidently the much-vaunted “recovery” still hasn’t reached
beyond Wall Street and gotten down to ordinary people. In “‘I’ll
Never Retire’: Americans Break Record for Working Past 65.” there are five
reasons given for more older Americans continuing to work past “retirement
age.” Number One? They need the
money. Sixty percent gave money as their
primary reason for working past “retirement age.” Next (36%) was they just like their jobs . .
. which means that 74% of Americans don’t
like their jobs. . . . Next is that people are living longer and healthier, and
want something to do. Then, employers
want (some) experienced workers to stick around longer, and — finally — is that
retirement isn’t any fun. Evidently two
weeks of doing nothing is about the maximum before some people start going
crazy. From the perspective of the Just
Third Way, of course, this raises concerns about two issues: 1) The wage
system’s inability to provide adequately for retirement, and 2) Whether the
concept of “retirement” even makes sense in an ownership economy.
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| When was the last time YOU smiled? |
• Here’s the usual announcement about the Amazon Smile program, albeit moved to
the bottom of the page so you don’t get tired of seeing it. To participate in the Amazon Smile program
for CESJ, go to https://smile.amazon.com/. Next, sign in to your account. (If you don’t have an account with Amazon,
you can create one by clicking on the tiny little link below the “Sign in using
our secure server” button.) Once you
have signed into your account, you need to select CESJ as your charity — and
you have to be careful to do it exactly this way: in the
space provided for “Or select your own charitable organization” type “Center for Economic and Social Justice
Arlington.” If you type anything
else, you will either get no results or more than you want to sift
through. Once you’ve typed (or copied
and pasted) “Center for Economic and
Social Justice Arlington” into the space provided, hit “Select” — and you
will be taken to the Amazon shopping site, all ready to go.
• As of this morning, we have had
visitors from 50 different countries and 44 states and provinces in the United
States and Canada to this blog over the past two months. Most visitors are from
the United States, the United Kingdom, Brazil, Australia, and South Africa. The
most popular postings this past week in descending order were “Thomas Hobbes on
Private Property,” “The Purpose of Production,” “Financial Resilience,” “Aristotle
on Private Property,” and “Reaction to Resilience, I: Can the State Create
Money?”
Those are the happenings for this week, at least those that
we know about. If you have an
accomplishment that you think should be listed, send us a note about it at
mgreaney [at] cesj [dot] org, and we’ll see that it gets into the next “issue.” If you have a short (250-400 word) comment on
a specific posting, please enter your comments in the blog — do not send them
to us to post for you. All comments are
moderated, so we’ll see it before it goes up.
#30#