Social Leadership: The Challenge to Our Schools (1940)

[193] Many have been wondering about the INSTITUTE OF SOCIAL ORDER. What is its reason for existence? After a long time, we think we have found the answer. Our mission in life is to worry people. To prod, prick, good people. Not for the sheer pleasure of sticking pins in people, but to arouse them to a realization that there are social problems, that the necessary and vital emphasis today of Catholic teaching and Catholic activity is a social emphasis, that the social apostolate is not the work of a few specialists, but the task of the Church and of every member of the Church.

Time and time again we come up against the question, puzzled and well-meaning: "Why talk to people about the reconstruction of the social order if they are perfectly satisfied with the social order as it exists right now? the same question has been asked, sometimes in all simplicity, sometimes maliciously, of the mission work of the Church. Why bother pagans with Christianity if they are more or less satisfied as they are? Why hurl the Ten Commandments at them if they are happy in their ignorance of the Ten Commandments?["]

The answer to the question as applied to the reconstruction of the social order is that the people so happily satisfied with the world as it is are sitting peacefully on a volcano that is all set to erupt; and for their own greater happiness, it is necessary to disturb their present very temporary contentment. Pius XI thought there was something radically wrong with our present social order, so radically wrong that he wrote a letter to the world, calling on Catholics to do something about it and telling them in general terms just how to do it. Leo XIII, fifty years ago, actually "viewed with alarm," and warned that if something were not done immediately to remedy the situation, widespread revolution would result. Not much was done and widespread revolution did result. Pius XI "viewed with alarm” and warned that the principles and operation of the present social order tended inevitably to world war. The warnings of Pius XI were paid more respect because Communism and upheaval were already on the scene, but there has been no general response to the late Pontiff’s urgent plea, and world war is with us.

Worse is yet to come. Whether it is already too late to stave off that "worse” by a frantic universal Catholic mobilization to apply Catholic [194] social principles to the whole social structure, or whether our work is a work of preparation with the aim of rebuilding a new structure after the collapse of the present, it is hard to say. One thing is certain, that there is no time to be lost. Another equal certainty is that only Catholic social principles can work in either case. And a third certainty is that our schools should be preparing the leadership for the work.

Training leaders, of course, has always been the aim of our schools. The phrase in itself is rather vague. It is not always easy to judge either leaders, or the qualities of leadership. The number of Catholic names in Who’s Who does not necessarily prove Catholic leadership. The Catholic names in large print or in high places are not in themselves an argument that our schools have succeeded in their aim of training Catholic leaders. Even a full roster of priests and bishops is not proof of Catholic leadership unless priests and bishops, in their awareness of modern problems and the Church’s twentieth-century approach to modern problems, are actually leading people to play a Catholic part in salvaging and reconstructing the modern world.

As a test of our success, we might inquire into the Catholic influence of our graduates in politics, in the industrial world, in the labor field, in the professional world of law, medicine, engineering, advertising, writing, in the distinctly Catholic world of the parish, in the smaller world of the family. A Catholic leader is not merely a Catholic who succeeds in climbing to the top rung of his profession. A Catholic leader is a man who has made his influence as a Catholic felt in whatever be his chosen field, a man who has brought the thought of his surroundings more in harmony with the teachings of Christ. Or, to put it a little differently, a Catholic leader is a man who has brought Christ into the little world in which he moves, and brought the men and women of that world closer to Christ. Thus, a man never listed among "prominent Catholics” may be a real Catholic leader, while the "prominent Catholic” may actually be leading a retreat rather than an advance.

A statistical examination of conscience in the matter would be interesting and perhaps revealing. We might inquire into the number of our graduates who are exercising influential leadership (influential, as Catholics) in the field of education, particularly in the all-important educational fields of sociology and economics. We might inquire into the number of our graduates who are exercising a really Catholic leadership in politics, in law, in medicine, in labor, in industry, in the field, so important today, of labor law, in the field of the social sciences. Have our graduates in all these fields exerted their energies to bring a Christian viewpoint into their field? Have they fought the current that has led to collapse, the current of individualism, the current of materialism, in judging success, or have [195] they been merely men who "made good" in their chosen fields? Has the ideal of success as drilled into our students in their college courses differed fundamentally from the ideal of success accepted in non-Catholic institutions? Has their choice of life been really a vocation in which they sought an opportunity of service, service to country and service to Christ, in spreading the principles of Christ?

All that would be interesting and to a certain extent important, but more important still would be a consideration of the lines that that training for leadership must take in our schools today.

Catholicism is complete, inexhaustible in the sense that it has in itself the ability to meet every situation and every error. While Catholicism must always be a complete teaching and a complete way of life, emphasis at different periods will vary according to the needs of the time. And the needs of the present time call for a special emphasis on the social aspect of Catholicity. The great and necessary apostolate of the Church today is its social apostolate, so that our training in leadership must aim from the very first year in high school to awaken in our students an acute awareness of the very real social problems of the world, to inculcate in every student a deep sense of personal social responsibility and a thorough knowledge of the social doctrines of the Church which must be the foundation of any real Social Reconstruction.

The insistence on social Catholicity is the Church’s answer to individualism run riot, just as devotion to the Sacred Heart was the Church’s answer to Jansenism, and the poverty of St. Francis was the answer of the Church to the worldliness of that era.

The insistence is necessary because even Catholic thought has not remained unaffected by individualism, the pagan philosophy of the last century. It could not remain unaffected, for individualism came cloaked in Catholic phrases like liberty, the dignity of the individual, the rights of human beings, the equality of all men. All these are Catholic concepts, all fundamental Catholic truths when properly understood. But underneath the phrases was a sordid selfishness entirely un-Catholic, a disregard of the social nature of man, an application to all living of the theory of evolution, the necessary hostility of all men, the survival of the fittest in a struggle for existence.

Today the effects of individualism are evident in family life, in industry, in politics, in international relations. The selfishness of individualism has resulted logically in divorce and birth control and the domination of the family by the state. Industrially, individualism has meant unbridled competition, the accumulation of large fortunes, the centralization of wealth and economic power, the spread of proletarianism. Worse still, it had as a result that men are satisfied with their proletarian condition, satisfied [196] with their loss of economic independence, and an easy prey to totalitarian ambitions. Free enterprise has meant the "right” of the wealthy to make money in any way whatever, and to do with money exactly as they willed. In the philosophy of labor unions, individualism means the "right” of labor unions, where powerful enough, to carry their demands beyond the realm of justice. In politics, individualism has meant ward bosses, graft and waste in government, government by special privilege. In international affairs, it has meant tariff wars and imperialistic expansion. The survival of the fittest, the superman, the unlimited freedom of the individual is logically and ultimately the survival and domination of a Hitler, a Stalin, a Mussolini. Our own nation has not yet traveled the full road, but the signs are all present, and individualism if unchecked in the United States must and will lead logically to the only thing to which individualism can lead—the selfish domination of the man or men powerful enough, brutal enough, and conscienceless enough to survive.

It would be flattering if we could say that Catholic education is entirely without blame in the present situation. But have we too taught an ideal of success that was rather an ideal of individual success? Many of our graduates have suffered from what Pius XI called a "strange cleavage of conscience” that failed to carry the religious principles of individual life into the field of industry, politics, and the professions. Many Catholics in high places, graduates of our schools, have merited the reproach that Pope Pius directed at those who, by their neglect of the fundamental principles of social justice, gave an excuse or pretext for the spread of Socialism and Communism. Catholic politicians have at times been a scandal to the Church. Catholic industrialists have rather generally subscribed to the theory that "business is business,” and have resented the papal insistence that the moral law should have an important place in the business world. Catholic lawyers, men who live individually edifying lives, have been heard to say that you simply must put your conscience in your back pocket if you wish to succeed in the world. Catholic workingmen have subscribed to the use of force on the theory that anything that works is good.

There has been, unfortunately, some foundation for these attitudes in the individualistic note that has come even into the teaching of religion. Frequently, the high point of religious education has been the study of apologetics, the defense of the Church, rather than the Apostolic Mission of the Church and the spread of the Church, the conquest of the opposition rather than the conversion of the opposition. In many places, until very recent times, spiritual development and seclusion went hand in hand, and the ideal Catholic was the one who preserved his spiritual life in a glass case from the contamination of contact with the world. In industrial ethics much of our energy has been spent in a defense of the right of private [197] property, to a neglect of the duties and limitations of the rights of private property. Most educated Catholics today would look askance at the priest who would tell them that they had not a perfect right to do anything they wish with the money they own.

Even into prayer individualism has made inroads. To a majority of Catholics, the very Sacrifice of the Mass remains an individual sort of prayer. They attend, they listen, but there is no unity in their attendance or their listening. Whether they have not been taught, or whether individual attitudes have been a barrier to the penetration of the lesson, they miss the universality and the unity of the Offering. They say their rosaries, they read prayers out of a book, but rarely do they offer Mass as a group, with the realization that they are one with all the Catholics of the world, one with all the saints, one with the Blessed Mother, one with Christ.

Individualism in prayer has led almost inevitably to the idea that religion is something individual, something private, something apart from the ordinary contacts of everyday life.

That is the situation; and in the presence of this situation the Church has gone back to the social consciousness of early Christianity to find the answer to individualism at one extreme and false collectivism at the other. The study of the doctrine of the mystical body, the liturgical movement, more active lay participation in the Mass, a deeper understanding of the highest dignity of the individual in the brotherhood of Christ and a consequent zeal to spread Christ to others are the spiritual foundations of the Church’s new social drive. Catholics are being taught more and more that man the person develops, and sanctifies his own individuality, not in isolation but in his social relations in the family, in the vocational group, in the parish, in the community.

Once a Catholic has grasped the idea that Catholicism must permeate all his social relations, individualism for him no longer exists. Catholic principles re-enter family life, neighborhood life, industry, law, and labor; and the vocation in life of a Catholic college graduate is not to "make good" but to make Christ influential in his sphere of activity. In his very choice of a vocation he will look to the possibility of serving the interests of Christ. He will aim to know the living conditions of his own neighborhood as well as he knows what is going on in Europe. He will be at least as interested in defending religion and democracy against enemies at home as he is in defending them against enemies abroad. He will know that the enemies at home, even in the Catholic camp, are indifference, poverty, proletarianism, and the consequent loss of self-reliant independence, an individualistic concept of religion summed up in the phrase, "Religion is all right in its place, but business is business, and politics are politics.”

[198] If our colleges today are to produce the leaders the times require, social responsibility must be drilled into them from the very first year of high school. The liturgical movement, corporate worship, the mystical body, sanctifying grace, the dignity of all human beings in the brotherhood of Christ must become as familiar as the Ten Commandments. A knowledge of Christ as a living leader must be at least as important as a knowledge of the four marks of the Church. Positive theology must be given at least an equal place with apologetics. Defense of the faith must not only give the answer to attacks of enemies, but a knowledge of the methods and technique of lay apostolate. The vocation of family life, with its high ideals, its importance, its responsibility, must be presented with the same reverence with which we treat the vocation to priesthood and religious life, the same insistence on necessary preparation, generosity, sacrifice, lifelong dedication.

The study of social problems must begin in early high-school years, and may not be limited to a refutation of Communism. "The Church defends private property," should be only the beginning of a high-school graduate’s knowledge of the Church’s doctrine on property. Catholic teaching today lays new stress on the limitations and social obligations of property, a defense of property not for the few but for the many, and on the need of a greater distribution of property as a safeguard of democracy and independence. An early interest must be aroused in industrial problems and labor problems, in the long-range planning for what Pius XI calls the "redemption of the proletariat," the eventual redistribution of property with the aim that more and more people will become owners of productive property. Industrial democracy, profit-sharing, joint management, cooperatives, farm problems, housing problems, population problems, race problems must be made personal problems, problems to which all Catholics must give serious thought and study.

But, if ever our high-school students are to be taught such subjects, then our colleges and universities must turn out men thoroughly qualified in every way to speak with authority on social subjects. No matter how highly we esteem the outstanding economists, sociologists, and social planners who are leaders in the field in non-Catholic universities, their approach and their philosophy are not and cannot be ours. Our universities must face the task of preparing Catholic scholars in these fields so thoroughly competent, so well trained that they will be in a position to command the respectful hearing of all scholars and build up in our universities and colleges a curriculum of social studies the equal of, or superior to, the very best that is offered anywhere in the country.

Briefly, Catholic leadership today is social leadership. Spiritually, intellectually, practically, the emphasis in our training must be on the social [199] doctrine of the Church. We must train leaders spiritually conscious of a great social responsibility, imbued with a high ideal of the Apostolic Mission of putting Christ on a twenty-four-hour basis in every phase of modern life, thoroughly competent scholastically and practically to undertake leadership in every field—in education, law, politics, industry, labor, the priesthood.

Beginning with the family, Catholic social principles must be made operative in the parish, the community, the professional and vocational world, the state. That is the task of modern Catholic leadership. And we in our schools have made a profession of leadership.

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Source: John P. Delaney, S.J., "Social Leadership: The Challenge to Our Schools," Jesuit Educational Quarterly 3, no. 4 (March 1941): 193–199.