Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: countries Roman Catholics are reactionary politically, even when they have been specially active in advocating particular social reforms. II. EXTERNAL SPIRITUAL AUTHORITY A very remarkable work for dealing from a Christian standpoint with all the acknowledged social evils of the day ? the miseries of the poor, the responsibilities of the rich, the greed and ruth- lessness of capital, and the disintegration of society ? was initiated by Bishop Ketteler of Mainz. He made a striking pronouncement at a Catholic Congress, in 1848, as to the importance of the task of bringing religion to bear upon social conditions,1 and eventually he had an extraordinary success in organising a body of earnest Christians who devoted themselves to social reform. The history of the German Catholic Congress shows how rapidly this work has developed. It has brought devout Christians into close contact with the aspirations and efforts of the democracy for material improvement.2 It has done much to smooth away the influence of class prejudices, and it has brought various societies for the promotion of human welfare into closer and conscious cooperation.3 It has also exercised a considerablepolitical influence through the Centre Party in Parliament, and the activity of its newspaper press. The principles and the methods on which Ketteler acted have received the sanction of Papal authority, and have inspired in no small degree the remarkable series of Encyclicals which Pope Leo XIII gave to the world. But the effort to undertake and carry on this social work of reorganisation was intimately connected, in Ket- teler’s own mind, with the recognition and maintenance of Papal authority. His own determination to throw his personal activities into the cause of the Church seems to have been due to his intense f…
