Giuseppe Toniolo and Christian Democracy

Extract

To Catholics of the older generation the names of La Tour du Pin, Leon Harmel, l’Abbe Naudet, l’Abbe Pottier, Henri Lorin, and with them those of Mgr. Ketteler and the two Cardinals Mermillod and Manning, evoke memories, memories of the movement known as Christian Democracy.

It is strange that those two words, which forty years ago aroused such hopes on the one hand, and at the same time such rage and resentment among good Conservative Catholics, mean very little to the youth of to-day. Is this really so? And if it is, will people ever speak of Christian Democracy again?

Professor Giuseppe Toniolo was not only one of its chief supporters, but its theorist. The epithet Christian as applied to democracy (which was then as much feared as communism is to-day) appeared in Italy for the first time in Father Curci’s voluminous work Christian Socialism, published in 1885. But it was the Belgian Verhaegen who, in 1893, brought the expression into current usage as an ideal to be fought for: “Christian Democracy” had henceforth an established footing.