The Catholic Social Movement in Germany

Extract

The Industrial Revolution had progressed through the earlier decades of the nineteenth century before there arose any true appreciation either of the vastness of the economic changes that were in progress or the extent of the social evils that were in rapid growth. Agriculture continued to fall back before the viiles tentaculaires of Verhaeren’s vision and a huge new and debilitated population crowded into the sordid streets as fast as they sprang up. It is true that as early as 1839 the Comte de Montalembert, stirred in his Catholic conscience by rumours as to the conditions under which the factory workers lived, journeyed up to Lancashire to see for himself ‘these appalling towns ‘which filled him with a ‘triple horror,’ but this was the gesture of a singularly kind-hearted politician rather than an experiment in scientific investigation. The emergence on every side of vast fortunes was guarantee enough to the average citizen that great material progress was being made, while the political economists of the day unhesitatingly enunciated the principles on which such progress could be relied on for the future.

Unexpectedly enough, it was in Germany that a new appreciation on Christian lines was to present itself on a wide scale with social and religious results of the highest importance. It was in the Western parts of the Empire, and more especially in the Catholic Rhineland, that industrial development first showed itself on lines similar to those in England, and these were the districts that had been most severely affected by the principles of the French Revolution and by the disasters of the Napoleonic wars.